from Hacker News

Vivaldi 4.0

by 0x49d1 on 6/9/21, 7:41 AM with 280 comments

  • by oblio on 6/9/21, 9:00 AM

    Vivaldi Mail? That took a while :-D

    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.

  • by ACS_Solver on 6/9/21, 9:42 AM

    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.

  • by Renaud on 6/9/21, 11:31 AM

    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.

  • by ckotso on 6/9/21, 10:47 AM

    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.

  • by rplnt on 6/9/21, 9:13 AM

    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.

  • by thanatos519 on 6/9/21, 9:18 AM

    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.

  • by j_koreth on 6/9/21, 9:20 AM

    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.

  • by Vinnl on 6/9/21, 9:02 AM

    Off-topic, but: does anyone know how Vivaldi is funded? I tried looking for it for a bit, but couldn't find any income streams.

  • by bitigchi on 6/9/21, 9:17 AM

    For an open-source recreation of Opera 12, there is Otter: https://otter-browser.org

  • by kitd on 6/9/21, 10:34 AM

    I use Vivaldi regularly for one reason: my company has disabled access to the developer tools on Chrome and FF. With Vivaldi (being Chromium) I have full access again!

    Just don't tell them I told you ...

  • by FlyingSnake on 6/9/21, 10:24 AM

    I'm a long time Firefox user and I still use Firefox for personal use. However my workspace is Google Heavy and Google Meet is a 2nd class citizen on FF. I hate chrome, and Vivaldi is the best blink based browser that fills this niche. I just love the tree-style tabs and Vivaldi was the only blink based browser that provided that. I really love it so far, and it's perfect for my use case.

  • by shortformblog on 6/9/21, 10:42 AM

    Since discussions about the browser’s approach to design philosophy and privacy are coming up in this thread, I’ll just flag that I did an interview with Jon von Tetzchner earlier this year where he talked about some of those things, as well as the lineage with Opera: https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile...

  • by niq999 on 6/9/21, 1:36 PM

    Using Vivaldi as my main browser since a few months ago. Tab grouping and tiling is great. The side panel is neat for checking on Skype without installing the app.

    I didn't experience any slowdown, but not being able to drag and drop files from downloads is a pain in the ass. It's been brought up on the forums and left at that years ago.

  • by amarant on 6/9/21, 10:00 AM

    Looks pretty good, but I'm a bit sceptical of the translation feature. They introduce it by saying Google has access to everything you translate, so therefore you should instead use their service, which sends the texts you translate to their servers in Iceland.

    The formulations try really hard not to say "trust us with your data instead of big tech", which seems like an attempt to hide the fact that they do have access to everything you translate, much like Google would have... The only question is who you trust more - Vivaldi or Google?

  • by edu on 6/9/21, 9:08 AM

  • by apocolyps6 on 6/9/21, 2:35 PM

    I really want to like Vivaldi. It's the only browser (afaik) that supports tabs on the side. Right now I use "Tree Style Tabs" on Firefox with some custom CSS to get rid of the original tab bar.

    Unfortunately I get a massive delay when fullscreening youtube videos in Vivaldi. The video first maximizes to the left half of my screen, and only then expands to the whole thing. Sadly a dealbreaker. FWIW its a little faster if I have the browser already maximized.

  • by amyjess on 6/9/21, 9:48 AM

    Have the Vivaldi developers confirmed whether or not they'll continue supporting Manifestv2? I think I heard something along those lines but I Can't remember where.

  • by junon on 6/9/21, 5:00 PM

    I'm not seeing this exact question answered elsewhere, but since Vivaldi is based on Chromium, does it have any code that randomly reaches out to remote servers (including but not limited to Google) aside from, of course, those which are requested by web page content?

  • by m3kw9 on 6/9/21, 12:20 PM

    “ Simply put, the era of blindly trusting Big Tech is over.”, but why should I trust small tech? How are these privacy features compared with Apple?

  • by traveler01 on 6/9/21, 9:50 AM

    I like Vivaldi but I do enjoy using my main browser also for web development. BUT, they do a browser for power users but couldn't care less with developers since they haven't fixed the broken responsive mode in the developer tools.

    Gonna keep using Brave...

  • by 0x49d1 on 6/9/21, 2:31 PM

    Using Vivaldi as my main browser for several months now. There are some problems with Google Docs, but other then that almost everything is fine. I really like company's attitude to its users, various researchers agree that they really don't leak what they say they don't. Firefox is superb too, but mobile browser experience is not there yet (I mean the new Android browser). Brave is another option, but I feel that Vivaldi is way more under my control and made "for me", even considering that Brave is open sourced.

  • by mattowen_uk on 6/9/21, 12:11 PM

    > As Vivaldi Mail supports IMAP and POP3

    And there was me hoping for Exchange-Sync support for Microsoft 365 email integration, to release the local reliance on Outlook 365 which gets worse with every revision :(

  • by timwis on 6/9/21, 3:10 PM

    Doesn't backing a chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave push the industry further toward browser monopoly? (or at least in the rendering engine sense, as we once had with IE)

  • by thayne on 6/9/21, 1:34 PM

    If Vivaldi were fully open source I would probably use it. But it's not.

  • by tannhaeuser on 6/9/21, 10:54 AM

    AFAIK Vivaldi is Webkit/Blink based so it'd be interesting to read a reflection on why the original Vivaldi code base was abandoned, if its abandoning was regretted, and on the state of the Web as a sustainable media format in general.

  • by rob74 on 6/9/21, 11:56 AM

    One killer feature for Vivaldi Mail would be supporting M$ two-factor authentication. Since my company made Exchange 2FA mandatory, I had to give up Thunderbird and use the Outlook 365 web interface due to lack of alternatives under Linux. That would definitely be in the spirit of giving you an alternative to Big Tech (at least on the client side). But I'm not sure if it's even doable though?!

  • by philonoist on 6/9/21, 11:59 AM

    If only we had a Vivaldi based on the Firefox.

  • by siproprio on 6/9/21, 6:53 PM

    I just can't stand the vivaldi UI. It's just too slow.

    Especially everything tabs feels awful. From new tab, to drag-and-drop.

  • by frr149 on 6/9/21, 3:21 PM

    From the post:

    (...)we offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly translation feature, powered by Lingvanex and hosted by Vivaldi, keeping translations out of the reach of companies like Google or Microsoft.

    Now I'm supposed to trust Vivaldi instead of Google or MS... Stopped reading right there.

  • by 627467 on 6/9/21, 11:17 AM

    I love the tiling capabilities of Vivaldi, it's been impressing people over videoconference too.

    I tried to use built in mail and calendar, but unfortunately my (work) life is too dependent on the little integrationa of Google calendar and gmail

  • by alexyz12 on 6/9/21, 6:19 PM

    I wonder how they plan to not become evil? It is explicitly planned or just that they are trying to offer a new alternative to the current evil thats not evil yet? Either one is fine, just wondering out loud.

  • by Theizestooke on 6/9/21, 9:59 AM

    Does it have the ability to containerize websites, like Firefox does?

  • by piyush_soni on 6/10/21, 8:51 AM

    Slightly off topic, but are there any users here who tried both Vivaldi and Brave? Which one did you keep and why?

  • by solmag on 6/9/21, 1:22 PM

    I would love to use Vivaldi but it is by far the slowest browser I've tried to use.

  • by luke2m on 6/9/21, 12:04 PM

    Glad to see translation, because I do trust Vivaldi more than Google.

  • by alichapman on 6/9/21, 9:16 AM

    Anyone else getting 500s trying to access this?

  • by eingaeKaiy8ujie on 6/9/21, 12:21 PM

    A closed source browser? lol

  • by inter_netuser on 6/9/21, 9:08 AM

    website is down.

    how much spyware is in their browser? is it fully open sourced?

  • by nik736 on 6/9/21, 9:06 AM

    It's down.

  • by swiley on 6/9/21, 12:12 PM

    It's great there are alternative browsers but being closed source and requiring a phone number is worse than Chrome.

  • by throw737858 on 6/9/21, 9:07 AM

    I think it follows spirit of old Opera 12 very well. It is even opensource (kind of).

  • by hellpirat on 6/9/21, 11:22 AM

    Is this super app? Oo

  • by barberpole on 6/9/21, 11:36 AM

    Vivaldi was a great musical genius.

  • by otabdeveloper4 on 6/9/21, 9:08 AM

    Not going to download it just to find out that they didn't bother supporting Office365.