Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser but by then it was too late.
It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.
It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality like the email client if you didn't use it.
Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(
Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but they're really slow and bulky.
> Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.
Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.
Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)
> you don't get to know its status in the meantime
Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.
They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.
I dunno, I've submitted four bugs. One solved within a day, one after 20 days, and two still unresolved as far as I know. It could of course be better, I don't think it's quite like you describe.
Loved Opera back in the day. It had "page specific settings" that would let me allow to set HTTP/Socks5 proxies on a per-page setting - today you cannot even set a proxy anymore without changing your system settings (not browser settings).
If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on some privacy invading sites.
And don't forget the ability to run a web server from within the browser. Opera was sometimes buggy, but it was really the first "browser as an operating system".
foxyproxy does this. i set up a ssh passthrough and routed foxyproxy with only specifed pages to use local proxy which meant they would be routed through the ssh. it worked for what i wanted
> It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.
And don’t forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).
Just to clarify in case someone's wondering, a browser named Opera still exists and gets updated now, but neither the people behind it nor the underlying technology are the same as in the old Opera this post is referring to.
As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures, Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind the old Opera experience.
I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most: Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is rather slow, as the parent post says.
Vivaldi is exactly as slow or fast as any Chromium-based browser. A this point I've surrendered to the notion of the web never getting faster, but just eating away any efficiency gains in computing.
I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home with Vivaldi now.
As someone who now uses Vivaldi as their daily driver I can vouch that it's a bit slow, especially on older hardware. Obviously it's not intolerable, but it would be nice to see some improvements in that area.
I use a browser probably 12 hours per day. Maybe there's enough people willing to pay a dollar or two a month for that to be a possible business model again.
This honestly sounds like a great idea. At this point I'd pay money for a browser that was private, fast, and dev-friendly, simply to avoid the moral dilemma of switching from FF to a Chrome clone.
No, it was not. That's a popular myth, but it's wrong. There were other browser with Tabs before opera event tried them. And Operas first attempts wasn't really Tabs in the modern sense. It was just a poor working button-bar for an MDI, which was a bit cumbersome to use. They fixed it two versions later, around the time when the feature gained attention in other browsers and even Mozilla Suit got it's first Extension that became so insanly popular that it was build into Phoenix (later renamend to Firebird, then Firefox) out of the box.
Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific functions they probablly were the first ones.
Opera had some ridiculously powerful keyboard shortcuts and performance as well for the time. I used to play this web game years ago and past beginner level the only way to compete was to use Opera because you could use a combination of keyboard shortcuts to send attacks/defences from multiple tabs within milliseconds.
> Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach)
I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use freeware when you can use premium software (which other people supposedly even pay for) for free".
I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.
Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more popularity than if you release it for free.
Not to forget Opera Mini which did server-side rendering for mobiles. Results were WAP-like quality and mostly sucked (by nature of device's capabilities back then).
I disagree. Opera mini allowed me to browse the web almost normally (I was using a Nokia E65) and I never really understood why I regularly see people saying the iPhone brought internet to smartphones or something of the sort.
Disagree. In 2007 I used a Nokia 6300 (https://i.imgur.com/5ezXN1R.png) and I had an unlimited data plan for €10/month (because, who was going to use a lot of data on 2G on a small feature phone?).
I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.
Also, during the days of Symbian OS Opera Mini was the best mobile browser available. I remember logging into my bank account and actually doing a transaction on my Nokia N73 running Opera Mini.
Not my experience. I use it out of nostalgia, but only for select sites. Many sites with modern SSL config won't load. Click a random link that lands you on a js-heavy site and the browser will stutter or often crash. Which is impressive because back in the day opera once had the fastest js engine by a mile. Goes to show how far V8 has come.
But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.
The Vivaldi mail thing must have been in the works for a while. Since very early on, they offered an email address at their .net domain. It wasn't integrated or an email client, but they had that aspect setup early on.
They licensed the browser for devices like set-top boxes and similar devices. There was also money coming from Google (for using it as a default search engine).
I guess they had also some business model built around Opera Mini and relations with mobile providers.
I want to offer Vivaldi some praise, I switched to it as my main browser a few years ago, and it's been great. I had to look for a new browser when Firefox (that I had used since the Firebird days) kept breaking my settings and plugins with their updates. After yet another Firefox update I wasn't able to restore the browser to how I want it to be, so I tried Vivaldi.
I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great, periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.
Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though not ideal.
Same. Huge fan of Opera 12, I was active in their community sites and reported bugs when possible. I'm glad to see them all coming back.
I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great!
It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).
If you want tabs and tiling in every program, you should give a tiling WM like Sway or i3 a try ;).
We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.
I find this statement a bit puzzling. Vivaldi is the slowest browser I've tried in recent years. The couple times I used it I always went back to Firefox after a few weeks because I couldn't stand the sluggish UI anymore. Maybe it improved by now, but I find it hard to believe it's now supposed to be faster after Firefox' massive performance updates.
I switched to Vivaldi from Chrome earlier this year as I was uncomfortable with the level of Google integration in that browser.
Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly.
I've had no issues so far.
The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.
I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.
You can always use multiple ("specialized") instances of portable Firefox (with MultipleInstance=true in ini file). That's how I do it, and I've been using portable Firefox versions exclusively for 10+ years, I think.
If you want Chromium sans Google, Ungoogled-Chromium or any QtWebEngine-based browser should work much better.
Ungoogled-Chromium is what I use when I want to use a feature in Chromium Devtools that isn't available in FF, or when I just beed to test my site in Blink.
How are you installing Chrome extensions without signing into Chrome first? I find I cannot install any of them for Vivaldi without signing into Chrome (which sort of defeats the purpose)
I've been using Vivaldi as my main/work browser for the last ~1 year. Tab tiling and tab groups have been absolute game changers for my workflow and curbed my objections departing from the firefox camp.
It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs for quite some time now.
I really tried to like Vivaldi, and it could be a good browser, but is so unbearably slow. The whole UI is unresponsive. Opening a new tab can take almost a second. Price for javascript apps I guess.
edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.
Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave up.
I found a bug that slowed it down a great deal. It was the fact that they put multiple `filter` styles onto the tabs, even when those filters did nothing useful. It was still extremely taxing on the GPU driver.
But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's a hidden setting you need to enable first, in vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a new computer.
The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I gave them the exact steps to fix it.
I just did some tests and was unable to replicate your results. I'm on an i5 2019 Mac, and Vivaldi takes about 200ms to open a tab, with or without CSS filters. (200ms is bearable, but it is slower than I would like.) I have Hardware Acceleration on and Use Animation off.
Do you have an older machine, or is it even slow on new machines?
I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome
and Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I upgrade my computer.
My experience with an 10 years old computer with win 7 is that firefox is slow and vivaldi is faster. I don't use chrome. On Android vivaldi is much faster than firefox.
After the 3.7 release they've improved UI responsiveness quite dramatically. In my laptop (i5, 8200U), opening a new tab or settings used to take 1 to 2 seconds, but now it hovers around 250~300ms.
It is indeed bloated. Its main redeeming quality in my opinion was that it was the only chromium-based browser that allowed sideloading extensions freely, but now that's gone too since Chrome and Brave have apparently started allowing it as well.
Odd because the one thing I remember about Opera from back in the day was how fast it was. This was back when Firefox was king amongst in-the-know users but IE6 was most popular overall. Opera was so much faster and smoother than everything else.
Opera was fast and stable, especially with more tabs open. Way into the Chrome era too. Too bad Google used it's monopoly to drive other browsers to death. Only Firefox survived really.
I'm trying Vivaldi again since as an expat I depend on single-click in-browser translation.
For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs, something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+ tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this, because dogma.
Vertical tabs without the 'tree' aspect (at least when I last used Vivaldi). Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension is still the best option I've found so far.
I switched from Firefox + Tree Style Tabs to Vivaldi + Tab Stacks and I mostly prefer it. The ability to tile tabs within a group is the killer feature, as well as it being much better supported by being native. Stack by host is great too. The big tradeoff is that you only get one layer of nesting, but I find it's generally worth that tradeoff for me.
Neat! I'm not the grandparent poster, but I also can't stand horizontal tabs, probably because I'm a tab hoarder. But with screens wider than they are tall, vertical tabs make sense, and each new tab doesn't truncate all other tabs' titles.
I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine on the right side.
I'm surprised it took this long for Vivaldi Mail to come out. I believe it was teased relatively early on in Vivaldi's life although I don't envy the developers that had to work with IMAP.
I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be thrown away considering privacy concerns.
I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any competition to the market.
For IMAP they seem to use emailjs-imap-client that is written by myself for Whiteout.io a long time ago. IMAP command tags are still prefixed with `W` that would stand for [W]hiteout. Nice to see my old code being useful :D
That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.
If it's free, then you're the product. Or will eventually be, plenty of projects have started out with good intentions and a noble cause only to be ultimately bought out, userbase and all. Creating something like Vivaldi 4.0 is not cheap, someone has poured cash in - who that is, I think the end-user should be entitled to know.
Readit News
Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser but by then it was too late.
It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.
It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality like the email client if you didn't use it.
Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(
Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but they're really slow and bulky.
Still, I wish them luck.
Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.
Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.
Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)
> you don't get to know its status in the meantime
Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.
They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.
If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on some privacy invading sites.
you can in firefox settings
you can also do it in chrome with the cli parameter --proxy-server
And don’t forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures, Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind the old Opera experience.
I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most: Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is rather slow, as the parent post says.
I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home with Vivaldi now.
[1] https://thebrowser.company/
Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even more.
Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific functions they probablly were the first ones.
I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use freeware when you can use premium software (which other people supposedly even pay for) for free".
I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.
Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more popularity than if you release it for free.
I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.
- Jamie Zawinski
Native UIs are much faster than web UIs, for example.
But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.
Deleted Comment
Clarifying it became a freeware browser which even after the end of its life remained closed source.
>but by then it was too late
It was the third most popular browser in the pre-Chrome era after IE and Firefox.
so, technically not very different to Brave although many users are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase
One of the worst things to happen to the web was for Google to start pushing at a speed and scale only they could keep up with.
The web is theirs now.
Dead Comment
I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great, periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.
Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though not ideal.
I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great!
It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).
I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.
We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.
Deleted Comment
Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues so far.
The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.
I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.
Last time was a couple of years ago and I had some trouble between instances but maybe I didn't do it right.
Ungoogled-Chromium is what I use when I want to use a feature in Chromium Devtools that isn't available in FF, or when I just beed to test my site in Blink.
It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs for quite some time now.
edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.
Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave up.
But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's a hidden setting you need to enable first, in vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a new computer.
The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I gave them the exact steps to fix it.
I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome and Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I upgrade my computer.
For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs, something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+ tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this, because dogma.
I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine on the right side.
I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be thrown away considering privacy concerns.
I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any competition to the market.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
I’m just finding it really hard to believe that it’s sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team…
Deleted Comment
That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.