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Vivaldi 2.0 – includes sync, resizable tab tiling, floating web panels and more

187 points by jonmccull 8y ago

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
(25 years FF user) Trying out Vivaldi 2.0, tab management is much better than Firefox, e.g. Vertical Tab View shows closed tabs, I can drag & drop closed tabs into a window to just reopen them.
- knfzn 8y ago
  Firefox has been out for 25 years? Or are you referring to Mozilla also?
  - Blaiz0r 8y ago
    Must be Mozilla. Phoenix was a breakout browser from the Mozilla suite, before it was renamed to Firefox, and that was around 2003 I think.
  - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
    Mosaic on an SGI or VAX/Tektronix not sure which one arrived first, we had both in our Unix pool at university.
    - djsumdog 8y ago
      NSCA Mosaic also made its way into IE. It's gone now, but as late as IE6, it was still referenced in the About dialogue.
- dorian-graph 8y ago
  No tree style tabs though
  - NO_CHANGE 8y ago
    You can group tabs and use the Window sidebar to view grouped tabs as indented items. I disable the tab bar and use the Window sidebar exclusively.
drake_112 8y ago
In the light of all the negative attention Chrome 69 has been getting around these parts I've found Vivaldi to be a very pleasant, more privacy-focused alternative.
chrisper 8y ago
Is the address bar still kind of slow when typing?
- duiker101 8y ago
  for the last few months I had that the browser was painfully slow for me, especially when opening new tabs, on a 2014 Macbook Pro so I had to stop using it while on the road. I recently installed v2.x(Snapshot) and it's back to being very performant. I don't know if what you experienced has been fixed but I think it's worth a shot seeing that it's a major release and a lot of things have changed. I am so happy to be using my favorite browser again!
throwaway255 8y ago
He gave an interview to Slashdot, where he [talked about tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to push their browsers, memory-hog in browsers, and other things](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/09/26/0713254/vivaldi-20-desktop-browser-featuring-expanded-customization-sync-across-devices-and-privacy-tools-released-qa-with-founder https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/09/26/0713254/vivaldi-20-...).
_trampeltier 8y ago
I love Vivaldi. Really a great browser. Special the you can see more than one tab at once, that's a really nice feature on todays large 32" and 43" screens. I wonder why nobody else does it. Vivaldi has it since beginning.
- jonmccull 8y ago
  Yes, this. The ability to drag and resize them now is just brilliant. I pretty much only use it to view two pages side-by-side, but when you try it with 4 or 5 tabs the resizing is a dream.
  - Aardwolf 8y ago
    I do that with other browsers with multiple windows. Meta+left and meta+right (in cinnamon and many other desktop UIs) automatically place the window in the left and right half of the monitor.
- werid 8y ago
  Vivaldi has it from beginning because von Tetzchner came from Opera, which also did this back in the day. Their pre-chrome version was an MDI application.
- nhumrich 8y ago
  Firefox can do this with an extension
  - mthoms 8y ago
    Except doesn't each browser window have full window chrome? If the idea is to save screen space that's a non-starter.
    - nhumrich 8y ago
      no. Thats only how the chrome extension works. In FF, its actually a true split.
- 8y ago
yAnonymous 8y ago
Seems pretty great so far. Is there a way to get the Firefox autoscrolling behavior, i.e. middle mouse click to toggle auto scroll mode?
- benbristow 8y ago
  There's a Chrome extension (aka Vivaldi Extension) you can use for it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...
- tEMporality7 8y ago
  This is the only reason I don't use Chromium based browsers on Linux - they don't support auto scrolling like Firefox. There is an addon however it does not work that well. Also why can FF do it without an extension and Chromium can't?
- Bayart 8y ago
  What do you mean by autoscrolling ? Scrolling by just moving the mouse up and down after a middle mouse click ? Vivaldi does that by default.
shady-lady 8y ago
Shocking the extent to which Vivaldi is innovating at the chrome level compared to Firefox(revenue 2016 > $500 million).
- spiritcat 8y ago
  Vivaldi just a custom Chromium though. Still, first post from Vivaldi. Gonna give it a try, mostly for the tab management features included by default. Could never get any of the new tab group extensions to work quite right (or at all) in Firefox after quantum. Also built-in vertical tabs and hibernate background tabs option! Even though I'll prob end up back at Firefox anyway since FOSS..
  - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
    Exactly my opinion.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Firefox is spending millions on political goals, failed OS' etc. Only a small portion is put into the progress of FF - speeding up rendering a notable exception.
  - _red 8y ago
    Ever since they forced out Brendan (co-founder and creator of javascript no less) because of their political intolerance, FF has really started to go down hill. Each release you have to go through more about:config settings to turn off all their "helper" apps (ie. spyware partnerships).
    - Allower 8y ago
      Care to elaborate on these '"helper" apps'? Personally I feel like Firefox has made significant progress this year in particular. Mostly because of the performance improvements. I haven't noticed any 'spyware partnerships' and that would certainly concern me.
hadrien01 8y ago
Why not integrate an open-source system like Firefox Sync?
- drdaeman 8y ago
  Because it's a total mess. I've worked on a protocol re-implementation for personal use, and I assure you it's quite ugly. And it's a moving target that changes once in a while, so supporting that is essentially being at Mozilla's mercy. Mozilla's Kinto could do the trick, though. I haven't dug inside but protocol-wise it looks quite good to my personal tastes. I believe this is what actually Mozilla wants to eventually switch Sync to. And if sync can be done with dumb backend storing encrypted blobs, then WebDAV is the most ubiquitous and simple option. Although it lacks realtime notifications which are quite important for sync.
  - hadrien01 8y ago
    Are you talking about Sync-1.1 or Sync-1.5 (post-2016)?
    - drdaeman 8y ago
      Sync-1.5 and Accounts. I used to run Sync-1.0 and it was okay. At least I didn't have to bother about protocol details. And now, even though it's FLOSS, it's still unmaintained abandonware so I don't think it's a good target. 1.5 is very different to 1.0. Just consider the fact that to log in to Accounts and use Sync you need to use three auth protocols: HAWK, OAuth2 and BrowserID. And serve a webpage with some custom JS (that iOS version for some reason would reject to load). And Sync alone is full of proprietary[1] stuff like X-Weave-Timestamp headers, application/newlines MIME type (seriously, not even a vendor extension), etc. It could've easily been WebDAV plus a few small protocol extensions where things didn't fit well. It is not. ____ [1] "Proprietary" as in "unique to this project, neither used by anything else, nor usable by anything else because it's poorly documented moving target without change warnings" not as in "non-FLOSS".
  - PurpleRamen 8y ago
    Realtime-notification could be implementad as an optional service running besides the dumb storage, triggered by whatever. It's not that bookmark-sync is so important for most people that they cannot wait some minutes till a periodical checker fetches the updates.
toyg 8y ago
I’ve used Vivaldi for a bit, and it’s a nice browser. Coming from Chrome, there is a pretty painless transition since most extensions will work fine. However, Vivaldi does nothing to improve the state of the web. It’s just another webkit, fostering the monoculture; and their business model and practices are basically the same as Google’s, just on a smaller scale.
- ljoshua 8y ago
  Care to expand on "their business model and practices are basically same as Google's?" As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right? [0]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 [1]: http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzchner-lets-retake-the-web-with-regulation http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzch...
  - toyg 8y ago
    Last I checked (admittedly a couple of years ago), they also did some tracking behind the scenes, in the bit of code that they had pointedly not released. The undercurrent vibe at the time was that there was no real guarantee that they wouldn't shop around your aggregated data; all I read in that interview is that they have not been "forced" to do it yet, but hey, "life is life" kinda thing. They still do little more than throwing tarballs over the fence every once in a while, with a muddy license that follows the letter rather than the spirit of opensource. There is no real bugtracker nor transparent development practices. I understand why they do it (people gotta eat), but to me that looks even less trustworthy than Mozilla, which at least has a certain entrenched culture that typically tries (not always successfully) to blunt the worst corporate decisions, and follows real opensource practices.
    - eirki 8y ago
      My impression is that they've explicitly advertised their intention not to sell user data: We’ve always taken data security extremely seriously. And we’ve long believed that everything you store in your browser belongs to you — which is why we’ll never sell your data, or willingly compromise your privacy
skshetry 8y ago
I tried Vivaldi a year ago. It was nice to have greater amount of customizations and I liked it very much. But, I couldn't use it for longer as it had memory leaks, so, if you opened and closed lot of tabs, you had to restart the Vivaldi from time to time. But, this might have been fixed and i should recheck.
O_H_E 8y ago
I love the users first approach they have been taking. They are constantly listening to feature requests and implementing the most common ones.
DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
Finally! I've been waiting for this for days now :) Most exciting feature for me are the auto-hiding and floating panels. Auto-hiding as in they disappear if you click anywhere outside them and floating as in they don't resize the actual browser window but instead cover it, so they don't cause pages to reflow their content, which can be annoying at times.
anon92612 8y ago
Does anyone know if Vivaldi (and Brave), render HTML/CSS/JS just like Chrome does? I know they are both based on Chromium, but just wondering if Google adds some "Googliness" to Chrome? As a web developer, if I just test my sites against Vivaldi, Brave, or other Chromium based browsers, can I guaranteed the rendering will be identical to Chrome? Or is it safer to also test in Chrome? Also, do all Chrome extensions work on Chromium based browsers?
- pacifika 8y ago
  yes, no not to the engine, yes, no and most but not all.
- bla2 8y ago
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/chromium_browser_vs_google_chrome.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/c... suggests that rendering in Chrome and Chromium is identical, so as long as Vivaldi and Brave keep their Chromium updated it should render the same as Chrome.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ModernMech 8y ago
Any word if the browser supports pinch to zoom yet? That's been holding me back from using it.
- clessg 8y ago
  Works for me on an rMBP.
ColanR 8y ago
I looked at vivaldi about a year ago, and the only thing I missed was bookmark synchronization. Looking forward to trying it again.
ubertaco 8y ago
Sync is good, but if they want to sway me away from either Firefox or Chrome, that sync needs to include syncing with a mobile browser. Otherwise it satisfies a 20% case for sync while missing the 80% case.
nerdponx 8y ago
What is Vivaldi's business model?
- sulami 8y ago
  I've been wondering about this for a while. Especially now that they're actively supplying servers to support sync (which also at least at the time of writing doesn't seem to allow running your own server).
  - whoknowsnobody 8y ago
    The same as Mozilla, default bookmarks and search engines. The founder, Jon, said that in every interview they ask him, shouldn't be too hard to find.
    - sulami 8y ago
      That makes sense. I wonder how viable this is financially, given that it's a very niche browser, at least right now.
      - whoknowsnobody 8y ago
        I think Jon said somewhere that to start being profitable they needed something about 3 million users, and Vivaldi already has more than 800 000 according to their page and I heard some other sites saying it's already at over 1 million.
        nerdponx 8y ago
        That's surprisingly economical, much more than I expected. I suppose "no tracking" search engines like DDG have a similar approach.
        whoknowsnobody 8y ago
        Actually I don't thinks it's so surprising, the 90s did not have tracking and companies have survived and grown. But tracking is probably +5x more profitable minimum, while Vivaldi or Mozilla might get some $1/user Google probably makes $5-$15/user. And the reason of all the tracking and why companies fight so hard against legislation that try to cut their cash cow.
krn 8y ago
Sadly, Vivaldi is not an open-source web browser[1]. [1] https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/
- craftyguy 8y ago
  And it uses Blink, so it's basically a proprietary version of chromium.
- ddevault 8y ago
  Until the headline reads "Vivaldi source code released", the browser is irrelevant. They really need to get their act together on this point, there's no excuse for a closed source web browser in 2018.
  - class4behavior 8y ago
    Did any of you even bother to read the entry behind that link?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      Yes. Would you care to point out.exactly what you think I missed?
      - class4behavior 8y ago
        The link clearly describes that de facto you have access to Vivaldi's entire code.
        Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        "Because you can disassemble it, it's de-facto open source" Give me a freaking break.
        LocalH 8y ago
timothevs 8y ago
Is it possible to load two instances - with different profiles? For instance Opera/Opera Beta can be run simultaneously with different profiles.
- batat 8y ago
  vivaldi --user-data-dir=...
ComputerGuru 8y ago
Vivaldi has severe touchpad scroll lag under Windows, making it neigh unusable (with and without smooth scrolling enabled). How do developers manage to consistently break functionality that is natively implemented correctly in the OS?
kleff 8y ago
I was really hoping 2.0 would include the integrated e-mail client they teased a looong time ago. By now I think that is the only feature I still miss from the Opera 12 days.
- NO_CHANGE 8y ago
  The email client was also really handy for reading rss feeds. It made the notes tool more useful for grabbing web content and then composing an email with it.
steinso 8y ago
My biggest gripe with Vivaldi is that the first option when right clicking a link is to open in new tab and focus it. This seems like a small issue, but this is different to all major browsers which has open in new _background_ tab as the default option. There is 10 years of muscle memory for me to overcome to switch and I just can't do it.
- aquadrop 8y ago
  It's new tab in the first option for me.
  - steinso 8y ago
    Just checked, you are right! The issue was actually that it focuses the tab when you open it, it does not open it in the background. I have clarified the comment, thanks!
    - def_true_false 8y ago
      Middle click should do the trick, though sometimes it's broken (usually when people fail to imitate a link with JS).
- atombender 8y ago
  On macOS, Cmd+click will open the tab in the background. Probably Ctrl+click on Windows/Linux? No need to go through the context menu.
- rasz 8y ago
  This being first option is a non issue. Not being able to customize right click menu like in Opera IS a deal breaker.
yAnonymous 8y ago
For the love of god, please save the window position of the developer tools when they're in a separate window. Firefox also fails at this.
dishanr 8y ago
I want to give this a try but I'm relying heavily on Firefox Containers now to separate different login sessions. I wonder if there's something similar on Vivaldi(Chrome)
surfcao 8y ago
If you have vim fingers like me, vivaldi + surfingkeys is probably the closest to replace vimperator+ firefox.
- scns 8y ago
  Using Saka Key atm, should be available on chrome too.
navinsylvester 8y ago
I use firefox as my primary browser but used chrome as secondary for misc. Did away with chrome recently and am trying vivaldi. So far i observed that session restart is not reliable. Tab open by default takes you to the page and there is an option to open tab in background but its quite annoying that its not the default. Calling a norm as being out of place is quite a stand. Developers who normally have the tendency to open multiple pages at once from search results will find this feature bothersome when trying it out. I don't think its a game changer but can be a worthy contender for a secondary browser option.
swrobel 8y ago
...and yet still no way to customize the toolbar. Am I seriously the only one out there who can't stand having a pointless Home Button taking up space?
- drcongo 8y ago
  No, you're not. And it's an ugly button at that.
- rasz 8y ago
  you can do some customization if you are willing to dive into CSS and ugly React 1MB of slow hackfest mess.
ayoisaiah 8y ago
Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now Firefox is likely to remain my default browser, but there's a lot to like about Vivaldi.
- shady-lady 8y ago
  > Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now I feel that's how it should be. OS > Browser > Browser Extension > Website Using some sites(JIRA in particular) in Firefox is painful as they just capture every keypress/combo regardless of whether they need it or not. Yes, it's lazy on the website devs part but that is why I think they should be last in line.
  - ayoisaiah 8y ago
    You're not wrong, but what I meant is that they were conflicts, and the browser's shortcuts took precedence. Like Ctrl+b to bold text and others. Many threads were open on this problem on the Vivaldi forum. I was not used to this with Chrome and Firefox, so it surprised me.
    - whoknowsnobody 8y ago
      It's fixed now, Vivaldi behaves like the others with keyboard shortcuts.
rayascott 8y ago
Can any browser out there, Vivaldi or otherwise, take the tabs of a window and save the corresponding list of URLs so I can reopen that window of tabs at a later date? That’s one essential feature I want from a browser, I’ve grown to desire more over the years, but for some strange reason, no browser I’ve seen out there allows you to treat sets of URLs as such.
- spraak 8y ago
  I wonder if there is an API that you could access to get that? I'd like that feature too.
- frlnBorg 8y ago
  https://www.guidingtech.com/1048/restore-save-tabs-google-chrome/ https://www.guidingtech.com/1048/restore-save-tabs-google-ch...
- pennaMan 8y ago
  There are extensions for Chrome and Firefox that do exactly that. https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/
  - rayascott 8y ago
    Thanks for the extensions but my idea is more around browsers treating our activity more as multiple projects that we’re working on. Like associated files, they’re associated URLs. Extensions are fool, but you’d think the browser wars would spur greater innovation in this area.
    - yoz-y 8y ago
      I feel that browser wars have finished and the winners are Chrome and mobile Safari. Other browsers now fight for numbers so advanced features are not really a priority.
- atombender 8y ago
  Safari can save all of a window's tabs to a bookmark folder, and it supports opening a whole folder as a new window. There's no "sync", though; if you save the tabs to a folder, then open the folder as tabs, there's no link to update the folder again. Saving the new window as tabs will create another folder.
NO_CHANGE 8y ago
I love it. It feels like I'm using Opera 12 again. 72 open tabs in my current window with 24 closed tabs. What's even nicer is having tabs grouped by topics I've been looking at where I collapse most of them to save visual space in the tab tree. Bookmark sync was the last thing I needed to switch away from Opera. It helps to have shared bookmarks when I run separate profiles for work and hobbies.

187 points by jonmccull 8y ago

(25 years FF user) Trying out Vivaldi 2.0, tab management is much better than Firefox, e.g. Vertical Tab View shows closed tabs, I can drag & drop closed tabs into a window to just reopen them.

knfzn 8y ago
Firefox has been out for 25 years? Or are you referring to Mozilla also?
- Blaiz0r 8y ago
  Must be Mozilla. Phoenix was a breakout browser from the Mozilla suite, before it was renamed to Firefox, and that was around 2003 I think.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Mosaic on an SGI or VAX/Tektronix not sure which one arrived first, we had both in our Unix pool at university.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    NSCA Mosaic also made its way into IE. It's gone now, but as late as IE6, it was still referenced in the About dialogue.
dorian-graph 8y ago
No tree style tabs though
- NO_CHANGE 8y ago
  You can group tabs and use the Window sidebar to view grouped tabs as indented items. I disable the tab bar and use the Window sidebar exclusively.

drake_112 8y ago

In the light of all the negative attention Chrome 69 has been getting around these parts I've found Vivaldi to be a very pleasant, more privacy-focused alternative.

chrisper 8y ago

Is the address bar still kind of slow when typing?

duiker101 8y ago
for the last few months I had that the browser was painfully slow for me, especially when opening new tabs, on a 2014 Macbook Pro so I had to stop using it while on the road. I recently installed v2.x(Snapshot) and it's back to being very performant. I don't know if what you experienced has been fixed but I think it's worth a shot seeing that it's a major release and a lot of things have changed. I am so happy to be using my favorite browser again!

throwaway255 8y ago

He gave an interview to Slashdot, where he [talked about tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to push their browsers, memory-hog in browsers, and other things](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/09/26/0713254/vivaldi-20-desktop-browser-featuring-expanded-customization-sync-across-devices-and-privacy-tools-released-qa-with-founder https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/09/26/0713254/vivaldi-20-...).

_trampeltier 8y ago

I love Vivaldi. Really a great browser. Special the you can see more than one tab at once, that's a really nice feature on todays large 32" and 43" screens. I wonder why nobody else does it. Vivaldi has it since beginning.

jonmccull 8y ago
Yes, this. The ability to drag and resize them now is just brilliant. I pretty much only use it to view two pages side-by-side, but when you try it with 4 or 5 tabs the resizing is a dream.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  I do that with other browsers with multiple windows. Meta+left and meta+right (in cinnamon and many other desktop UIs) automatically place the window in the left and right half of the monitor.
werid 8y ago
Vivaldi has it from beginning because von Tetzchner came from Opera, which also did this back in the day. Their pre-chrome version was an MDI application.
nhumrich 8y ago
Firefox can do this with an extension
- mthoms 8y ago
  Except doesn't each browser window have full window chrome? If the idea is to save screen space that's a non-starter.
  - nhumrich 8y ago
    no. Thats only how the chrome extension works. In FF, its actually a true split.
8y ago

yAnonymous 8y ago

Seems pretty great so far. Is there a way to get the Firefox autoscrolling behavior, i.e. middle mouse click to toggle auto scroll mode?

benbristow 8y ago
There's a Chrome extension (aka Vivaldi Extension) you can use for it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...
tEMporality7 8y ago
This is the only reason I don't use Chromium based browsers on Linux - they don't support auto scrolling like Firefox. There is an addon however it does not work that well. Also why can FF do it without an extension and Chromium can't?
Bayart 8y ago
What do you mean by autoscrolling ? Scrolling by just moving the mouse up and down after a middle mouse click ? Vivaldi does that by default.

shady-lady 8y ago

Shocking the extent to which Vivaldi is innovating at the chrome level compared to Firefox(revenue 2016 > $500 million).

spiritcat 8y ago
Vivaldi just a custom Chromium though. Still, first post from Vivaldi. Gonna give it a try, mostly for the tab management features included by default. Could never get any of the new tab group extensions to work quite right (or at all) in Firefox after quantum. Also built-in vertical tabs and hibernate background tabs option! Even though I'll prob end up back at Firefox anyway since FOSS..
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Exactly my opinion.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
Firefox is spending millions on political goals, failed OS' etc. Only a small portion is put into the progress of FF - speeding up rendering a notable exception.
- _red 8y ago
  Ever since they forced out Brendan (co-founder and creator of javascript no less) because of their political intolerance, FF has really started to go down hill. Each release you have to go through more about:config settings to turn off all their "helper" apps (ie. spyware partnerships).
  - Allower 8y ago
    Care to elaborate on these '"helper" apps'? Personally I feel like Firefox has made significant progress this year in particular. Mostly because of the performance improvements. I haven't noticed any 'spyware partnerships' and that would certainly concern me.

hadrien01 8y ago

Why not integrate an open-source system like Firefox Sync?

drdaeman 8y ago
Because it's a total mess. I've worked on a protocol re-implementation for personal use, and I assure you it's quite ugly. And it's a moving target that changes once in a while, so supporting that is essentially being at Mozilla's mercy. Mozilla's Kinto could do the trick, though. I haven't dug inside but protocol-wise it looks quite good to my personal tastes. I believe this is what actually Mozilla wants to eventually switch Sync to. And if sync can be done with dumb backend storing encrypted blobs, then WebDAV is the most ubiquitous and simple option. Although it lacks realtime notifications which are quite important for sync.
- hadrien01 8y ago
  Are you talking about Sync-1.1 or Sync-1.5 (post-2016)?
  - drdaeman 8y ago
    Sync-1.5 and Accounts. I used to run Sync-1.0 and it was okay. At least I didn't have to bother about protocol details. And now, even though it's FLOSS, it's still unmaintained abandonware so I don't think it's a good target. 1.5 is very different to 1.0. Just consider the fact that to log in to Accounts and use Sync you need to use three auth protocols: HAWK, OAuth2 and BrowserID. And serve a webpage with some custom JS (that iOS version for some reason would reject to load). And Sync alone is full of proprietary[1] stuff like X-Weave-Timestamp headers, application/newlines MIME type (seriously, not even a vendor extension), etc. It could've easily been WebDAV plus a few small protocol extensions where things didn't fit well. It is not. ____ [1] "Proprietary" as in "unique to this project, neither used by anything else, nor usable by anything else because it's poorly documented moving target without change warnings" not as in "non-FLOSS".
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  Realtime-notification could be implementad as an optional service running besides the dumb storage, triggered by whatever. It's not that bookmark-sync is so important for most people that they cannot wait some minutes till a periodical checker fetches the updates.

toyg 8y ago

I’ve used Vivaldi for a bit, and it’s a nice browser. Coming from Chrome, there is a pretty painless transition since most extensions will work fine. However, Vivaldi does nothing to improve the state of the web. It’s just another webkit, fostering the monoculture; and their business model and practices are basically the same as Google’s, just on a smaller scale.

ljoshua 8y ago
Care to expand on "their business model and practices are basically same as Google's?" As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right? [0]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 [1]: http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzchner-lets-retake-the-web-with-regulation http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzch...
- toyg 8y ago
  Last I checked (admittedly a couple of years ago), they also did some tracking behind the scenes, in the bit of code that they had pointedly not released. The undercurrent vibe at the time was that there was no real guarantee that they wouldn't shop around your aggregated data; all I read in that interview is that they have not been "forced" to do it yet, but hey, "life is life" kinda thing. They still do little more than throwing tarballs over the fence every once in a while, with a muddy license that follows the letter rather than the spirit of opensource. There is no real bugtracker nor transparent development practices. I understand why they do it (people gotta eat), but to me that looks even less trustworthy than Mozilla, which at least has a certain entrenched culture that typically tries (not always successfully) to blunt the worst corporate decisions, and follows real opensource practices.
  - eirki 8y ago
    My impression is that they've explicitly advertised their intention not to sell user data: We’ve always taken data security extremely seriously. And we’ve long believed that everything you store in your browser belongs to you — which is why we’ll never sell your data, or willingly compromise your privacy

skshetry 8y ago

I tried Vivaldi a year ago. It was nice to have greater amount of customizations and I liked it very much. But, I couldn't use it for longer as it had memory leaks, so, if you opened and closed lot of tabs, you had to restart the Vivaldi from time to time. But, this might have been fixed and i should recheck.

O_H_E 8y ago

I love the users first approach they have been taking. They are constantly listening to feature requests and implementing the most common ones.

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago

Finally! I've been waiting for this for days now :) Most exciting feature for me are the auto-hiding and floating panels. Auto-hiding as in they disappear if you click anywhere outside them and floating as in they don't resize the actual browser window but instead cover it, so they don't cause pages to reflow their content, which can be annoying at times.

anon92612 8y ago

Does anyone know if Vivaldi (and Brave), render HTML/CSS/JS just like Chrome does? I know they are both based on Chromium, but just wondering if Google adds some "Googliness" to Chrome? As a web developer, if I just test my sites against Vivaldi, Brave, or other Chromium based browsers, can I guaranteed the rendering will be identical to Chrome? Or is it safer to also test in Chrome? Also, do all Chrome extensions work on Chromium based browsers?

pacifika 8y ago
yes, no not to the engine, yes, no and most but not all.
bla2 8y ago
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/chromium_browser_vs_google_chrome.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/c... suggests that rendering in Chrome and Chromium is identical, so as long as Vivaldi and Brave keep their Chromium updated it should render the same as Chrome.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ModernMech 8y ago

Any word if the browser supports pinch to zoom yet? That's been holding me back from using it.

clessg 8y ago
Works for me on an rMBP.

ColanR 8y ago

I looked at vivaldi about a year ago, and the only thing I missed was bookmark synchronization. Looking forward to trying it again.

ubertaco 8y ago

Sync is good, but if they want to sway me away from either Firefox or Chrome, that sync needs to include syncing with a mobile browser. Otherwise it satisfies a 20% case for sync while missing the 80% case.

nerdponx 8y ago

What is Vivaldi's business model?

sulami 8y ago
I've been wondering about this for a while. Especially now that they're actively supplying servers to support sync (which also at least at the time of writing doesn't seem to allow running your own server).
- whoknowsnobody 8y ago
  The same as Mozilla, default bookmarks and search engines. The founder, Jon, said that in every interview they ask him, shouldn't be too hard to find.
  - sulami 8y ago
    That makes sense. I wonder how viable this is financially, given that it's a very niche browser, at least right now.
    - whoknowsnobody 8y ago
      I think Jon said somewhere that to start being profitable they needed something about 3 million users, and Vivaldi already has more than 800 000 according to their page and I heard some other sites saying it's already at over 1 million.
      - nerdponx 8y ago
        That's surprisingly economical, much more than I expected. I suppose "no tracking" search engines like DDG have a similar approach.
        whoknowsnobody 8y ago
        Actually I don't thinks it's so surprising, the 90s did not have tracking and companies have survived and grown. But tracking is probably +5x more profitable minimum, while Vivaldi or Mozilla might get some $1/user Google probably makes $5-$15/user. And the reason of all the tracking and why companies fight so hard against legislation that try to cut their cash cow.

krn 8y ago

Sadly, Vivaldi is not an open-source web browser[1]. [1] https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/

craftyguy 8y ago
And it uses Blink, so it's basically a proprietary version of chromium.
ddevault 8y ago
Until the headline reads "Vivaldi source code released", the browser is irrelevant. They really need to get their act together on this point, there's no excuse for a closed source web browser in 2018.
- class4behavior 8y ago
  Did any of you even bother to read the entry behind that link?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Yes. Would you care to point out.exactly what you think I missed?
    - class4behavior 8y ago
      The link clearly describes that de facto you have access to Vivaldi's entire code.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        "Because you can disassemble it, it's de-facto open source" Give me a freaking break.
        LocalH 8y ago

timothevs 8y ago

Is it possible to load two instances - with different profiles? For instance Opera/Opera Beta can be run simultaneously with different profiles.

batat 8y ago
vivaldi --user-data-dir=...

ComputerGuru 8y ago

Vivaldi has severe touchpad scroll lag under Windows, making it neigh unusable (with and without smooth scrolling enabled). How do developers manage to consistently break functionality that is natively implemented correctly in the OS?

kleff 8y ago

I was really hoping 2.0 would include the integrated e-mail client they teased a looong time ago. By now I think that is the only feature I still miss from the Opera 12 days.

NO_CHANGE 8y ago
The email client was also really handy for reading rss feeds. It made the notes tool more useful for grabbing web content and then composing an email with it.

steinso 8y ago

My biggest gripe with Vivaldi is that the first option when right clicking a link is to open in new tab and focus it. This seems like a small issue, but this is different to all major browsers which has open in new _background_ tab as the default option. There is 10 years of muscle memory for me to overcome to switch and I just can't do it.

aquadrop 8y ago
It's new tab in the first option for me.
- steinso 8y ago
  Just checked, you are right! The issue was actually that it focuses the tab when you open it, it does not open it in the background. I have clarified the comment, thanks!
  - def_true_false 8y ago
    Middle click should do the trick, though sometimes it's broken (usually when people fail to imitate a link with JS).
atombender 8y ago
On macOS, Cmd+click will open the tab in the background. Probably Ctrl+click on Windows/Linux? No need to go through the context menu.
rasz 8y ago
This being first option is a non issue. Not being able to customize right click menu like in Opera IS a deal breaker.

yAnonymous 8y ago

For the love of god, please save the window position of the developer tools when they're in a separate window. Firefox also fails at this.

dishanr 8y ago

I want to give this a try but I'm relying heavily on Firefox Containers now to separate different login sessions. I wonder if there's something similar on Vivaldi(Chrome)

surfcao 8y ago

If you have vim fingers like me, vivaldi + surfingkeys is probably the closest to replace vimperator+ firefox.

scns 8y ago
Using Saka Key atm, should be available on chrome too.

navinsylvester 8y ago

I use firefox as my primary browser but used chrome as secondary for misc. Did away with chrome recently and am trying vivaldi. So far i observed that session restart is not reliable. Tab open by default takes you to the page and there is an option to open tab in background but its quite annoying that its not the default. Calling a norm as being out of place is quite a stand. Developers who normally have the tendency to open multiple pages at once from search results will find this feature bothersome when trying it out. I don't think its a game changer but can be a worthy contender for a secondary browser option.

swrobel 8y ago

...and yet still no way to customize the toolbar. Am I seriously the only one out there who can't stand having a pointless Home Button taking up space?

drcongo 8y ago
No, you're not. And it's an ugly button at that.
rasz 8y ago
you can do some customization if you are willing to dive into CSS and ugly React 1MB of slow hackfest mess.

ayoisaiah 8y ago

Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now Firefox is likely to remain my default browser, but there's a lot to like about Vivaldi.

shady-lady 8y ago
> Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now I feel that's how it should be. OS > Browser > Browser Extension > Website Using some sites(JIRA in particular) in Firefox is painful as they just capture every keypress/combo regardless of whether they need it or not. Yes, it's lazy on the website devs part but that is why I think they should be last in line.
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  You're not wrong, but what I meant is that they were conflicts, and the browser's shortcuts took precedence. Like Ctrl+b to bold text and others. Many threads were open on this problem on the Vivaldi forum. I was not used to this with Chrome and Firefox, so it surprised me.
  - whoknowsnobody 8y ago
    It's fixed now, Vivaldi behaves like the others with keyboard shortcuts.

rayascott 8y ago

Can any browser out there, Vivaldi or otherwise, take the tabs of a window and save the corresponding list of URLs so I can reopen that window of tabs at a later date? That’s one essential feature I want from a browser, I’ve grown to desire more over the years, but for some strange reason, no browser I’ve seen out there allows you to treat sets of URLs as such.

spraak 8y ago
I wonder if there is an API that you could access to get that? I'd like that feature too.
frlnBorg 8y ago
https://www.guidingtech.com/1048/restore-save-tabs-google-chrome/ https://www.guidingtech.com/1048/restore-save-tabs-google-ch...
pennaMan 8y ago
There are extensions for Chrome and Firefox that do exactly that. https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/
- rayascott 8y ago
  Thanks for the extensions but my idea is more around browsers treating our activity more as multiple projects that we’re working on. Like associated files, they’re associated URLs. Extensions are fool, but you’d think the browser wars would spur greater innovation in this area.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    I feel that browser wars have finished and the winners are Chrome and mobile Safari. Other browsers now fight for numbers so advanced features are not really a priority.
atombender 8y ago
Safari can save all of a window's tabs to a bookmark folder, and it supports opening a whole folder as a new window. There's no "sync", though; if you save the tabs to a folder, then open the folder as tabs, there's no link to update the folder again. Saving the new window as tabs will create another folder.

NO_CHANGE 8y ago

I love it. It feels like I'm using Opera 12 again. 72 open tabs in my current window with 24 closed tabs. What's even nicer is having tabs grouped by topics I've been looking at where I collapse most of them to save visual space in the tab tree. Bookmark sync was the last thing I needed to switch away from Opera. It helps to have shared bookmarks when I run separate profiles for work and hobbies.