We are all absolutely unique and we want different things. Vivaldi web browser lets you do things your way by adapting to you and not the other way around. You prefer the browser tabs placed at the bottom or on the side of the window? – You prefer a different address bar location? Go ahead and customize your preferences be it your keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, appearance and so on.
It’s supposed to scratch that Opera itch, but I know just how demanding Opera users are. I am really curious to see if Vivaldi will ever be able to walk in those footsteps.
Tried whilst it was in Beta and it was good then. Also noticing the cross platform support.
Slightly leaves me wondering and hoping it will continue to be sustainable given the resources needed to maintain it’s cutting edge.
I’ve been using Vivaldi on my main (Mageia 5) machine for months now (since I first discovered it last year) and it has been going like a dream. Crashes and errors have become increasingly rare and it is very fast in the 1.0 incarnation – the difference between this and the developer build immediately prior is quite amazing.
Keyboard zoom had been patchy (or I hadn’t been thinking about it much) but this is an important feature, as I tend to use different zoom levels in different tabs and having to use the mouse for this is an annoyance at times. Vivaldi also integrates well visually into my existing KDE4 desktop with a few changes of settings.
As it is based upon Chrome, I can install Extensions from the Chrome Store (did this again last night) and their interoperability is great. It’s a pleasure to be able to render bright pages comfortably dark with an extension like Dark Facebook, Dark Skin for YouTube and Stylebot.
The next thing would be some extension which substitutes for Opera’s little web server (and other doodads), which was so great to use. Also, skinning would be good but I can change the desktop colour scheme to suit, and this is looking pretty good right now. There is an issue with one web site where streaming has never been supported for some reason, but streaming and downloading from YouTube (using Download YouTube Chrome) and others such as PutLocker and Dailymotion is unaffected.
My personal opinion is that the decision to base the new browser on Chrome was a smart move, allowing users to take advantage of the functionality at least of existing available extensions. I have missed an up-to-date version of Opera very much – it was a very big part of my life here in Korea – and it has been wonderful to see the gradual improvements in performance in Vivaldi over the last ten months or so.
Vivaldi will have a permanent place on my machines from now on – even more so if the team decide to port it to Android, for use on my ASUS Transformer tablet (hint, hint, Jon!).
It’s only one: I cannot put the Tabs below the URL bar!!!! How can it be?? It’s an instant deal breaker to me.
Man, I can’t even look to a browser with the tabs at the top… it makes my head ache.
If somebody knows how to “fix” it, I will give Vivaldi a go (and drop Safari as my secondary browser).
You can, by putting them at the bottom of the window
Just like in the good old (really old) Opera days.
…but it’s nowhere near the flexible “power user” browser that Opera used to be. User interface wise, I’d much rather be using Opera 7 from 2002 than Vivaldi 1.0.
Vivaldi provides the option of a vertical tab bar for people who prefer to place it down the side of the screen. This is being cited as one of its key “power user” features for people who like to browse with lots of tabs open.
Back in Opera 7, one of the new features was a panel that displayed all tabs and windows in a tree format, with a search field to filter the list. You could quickly find a particular open tab (in any window) by typing a few letters of its title.
You could also select and manipulate multiple tabs, ctrl/shift clicking to select them, then dragging them as a group, or hitting delete to close them all. If you’d finished researching a topic, you could filter to find all the open tabs related to it, then select and close them all with a few clicks. That’s far more powerful than any tab management feature in Vivaldi.
Another Vivaldi feature — one people have been talking about as if it’s something new and exciting — is the ability to tile tabs in the same Window. This seems extremely inflexible in its current implementation. As far as I can see it isn’t possible to rearrange, or even resize, the tiled tabs.
In contrast Opera provided full MDI window management from its very first release. You could tile tabs in various ways and then move and resize those tiled MDI sub windows how you wanted. You could cascade them to see all the tabs you had open, or even minimise tabs to put them out of the way for later reading.
MDI worked in conjunction with some other Opera features, such as Follower Tabs, which displayed any link clicked in the active tab. If you were using a site listing links to documents you wanted to read through, you could turn that into a narrow tile, with a larger Follower Tab filling the rest of the window. Each link clicked would display in the follower tab, replacing its contents and reducing the need to open and switch between multiple tabs.
Those examples just scratch the surface of the rich set of features that used to be in Opera, but perhaps give an idea of how far Vivaldi would have to go to match it.
Hopefully this release is just a hint at the feature rich and customisable browser Vivaldi will become over time.
What I think is most striking about this is that MDI is a core feature of Windows, or also Qt, if you want it cross-platform.
One of Opera’s greatest innovations was as simple as treating web pages like MS Word treated documents.
These days the MDI concept became extremely unpopular, even the newer versions of MS Office do not use it by default (although still available as an option).
And the same happens to windowing in general. Users tend to keep their browsing confined in one single browser window. Users also tend to go fullscreen now with everything or use simple tiling.
So while it would be extremely simple from an implementation point of view to offer MDI like old Opera, it seems to make no point in terms of a “modern” user interface.
The tab tree feature you describe exists through various extensions, e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-style-tabs/b…
What I love most about your post however is the feature where different tabs would interact with each other. A feature that has a very solid and common use-case, yet is lacking in all modern browsers.
Again, this is your follower tab feature as an extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/niftysplit/bkmjnlfillpnkgm…
(You can install Chrome extensions in Vivaldi, I just don’t know if these also work)
Edited 2016-04-08 11:05 UTC
at this point the extension support is a little hit and miss. But its certainly better than a few builds back already!
I couldn’t get this to work properly in Vivaldi, but it’s interesting to see just how many old Opera features have been recreated as extensions.
Unfortunately many of them have bugs, incompatibilities, and integration issues that make them a good argument for building those features in…
How long before they decide that they don’t have as many users as they should, and cry to the EU for another browser ballot?
Does anyone know their stance on privacy? (Chrome itself being an example of “not very good”.)
I have exactly same concern! Hope someone puts light on that. Btw installed it on Linux and using it for past 2 hrs. It’s impressive for sure!
I second that, installed on my netbook with lubuntu and it feels faster than chrome. Really nice.