8 ms·

Otter Browser – Aims to recreate the best aspects of classic Opera UI using Qt5

109 points by bjoko 8y ago

fxfan 8y ago
I couldn't find any mention of rendering engine or capabilities and plugin system.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  opera 12.x FOSS version spinoff
  - lucideer 8y ago
    Opera 12 rendering engine was entirely closed source, so a FOSS spinoff isn't possible. This is mainly working on recreating the UI experience only, with a very different rendering engine.
    - signal11 8y ago
      Interesting - I’ll try it out, quite curious to see how it compares with Vivaldi, which has an Opera-like UI with the Chromium engine.
      - lucideer 8y ago
        Otter predates Vivaldi (at least publicly)—I think Otter started very very soon after Opera 12 was discontinued. It's also open source (which imo was Opera's downfall), and uses an engine that is not the dominant one on the market (albeit a close cousin); I think both of these points are on its favour. On the other hand, Vivaldi seems to have more resources behind it, as well as the name of Jon von Tetzchner, which helps adoption. It just seems to be making the same mistakes Opera did (closed source, so the community can never bring it forward independently), with the added downside of being really no different from the market leader under the hood (rendering).
        Jitnaught_ 8y ago
        Vivaldi's source code is available https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/
        em-bee 8y ago
        interesting, like the poster above i am fairly certain to remember that vivaldi was closed source at one point. i could not find any mention of the license anywhere on the site, so i dug it out of the source archive to find a 3-clause BSD license. very nice!
        lucideer 8y ago
        Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.
        em-bee 8y ago
        it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that. it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories EDIT: the README contains this: Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms. those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.
        vatueil 8y ago
        According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it): https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ > Is Vivaldi Open Source? > Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package. > In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit. > Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits This reddit comment explains in a bit more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_vivaldi_completely_opensource/de8h5kr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_v...
- dchest 8y ago
  QTWebKit (and experimental QtWebEngine based on Chromium)
warpech 8y ago
Screenshots: https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/ https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/
- vfclists 8y ago
  I find open source websites which can't provide a simple slideshow for viewing screenshots very depressing. Do these developers seriously expect interested viewers to click back and forth just to see their graphics?
  - stonogo 8y ago
    This is the first time I've ever heard 'clicking a mouse button' declared an egregious violation of the user's effort. Is this a widespread concern? How do you use the web?
    - Markoff 8y ago
      most of the people nowadays surf from mobile
nkkollaw 8y ago
My problem with alternative browsers is that I'm locked-in because of a few plugins, and I cannot be bother reinstalling all settings and plugins (including plugin settings) when I change computer. Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me. Otherwise, it's hard.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- catacombs 8y ago
  > Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me. Firefox does this, no?
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Yup. I did use if for a while.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Brave can use Chrome plugins. No tracking, optional Tor.
mda 8y ago
It is admirable that they took on this job, but I would probably stay away from it for serious things because of security aspect. Modern browsers (Chrome - Firefox) are probably a much safer choice.
- amelius 8y ago
  On the other hand, browsers with a large user base are a more likely/profitable target for hacking.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    > A system or component relying on obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that if the flaws are not known, that will be sufficient to prevent a successful attack. Security experts have rejected this view as far back as 1851, and advise that obscurity should never be the only security mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
    - boffinism 8y ago
      Security through obscurity is bad, but the original comment wasn't about security through obscurity in that sense.
  - mkl 8y ago
    This is Chromium-based, so is part of the largest user base, and because it's downstream it will always be at least a bit out of date. I think there are lots of useful things alternative browsers could do, and I'd like to see some succeed, but this problem seems difficult to get around.
- pard68 8y ago
  I don't think that is a reason to not attempt developing new things. And anyways, this is using the QTWebKit, my understanding is most of the security related aspects are from there. Since it is a fork of WebKit I imagine it gets security updates from there.
abrowne 8y ago
There's also Falkon, now a KDE project, which I prefer. The UI is more like Firefox, and it's QtWebEngine-only, which is maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days. https://www.falkon.org/ https://www.falkon.org/
- kodablah 8y ago
  > maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days Seems somewhat revived/maintained by annulen [0] as pointed out in these release notes. Also, QtWebEngine seems to usually be behind a Chromium version or two which, among other reasons, is why I use CEF in my Qt-based browser (granted I'm behind a couple versions on public releases, but that's my fault). 0 - https://github.com/annulen/webkit/tree/master https://github.com/annulen/webkit/tree/master
  - abrowne 8y ago
    Yes, that QtWebKit revival is interesting and worth watching. I haven't followed, but I'm still not sure if it's up-to-date. This blog post from a WebKitGTK+ (with a section about QtWebKit) developer from 2017 is the best info I could find: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/08/06/endgame-for-webkit-woes/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/08/06/endgame-for-we... And yes, QtWebEngine does not keep up with Chromium, but it is updated to some degree. I wish Qt and distros could at least keep better up-to-date with security fixes, but it's easier said than done!
zerr 8y ago
The only reason I prefer Chrome over competitors is the speed of startup (including cold) even with lots of open tabs. I close and start the browser many times and so far nothing beats Chrome.
- em-bee 8y ago
  firefox solves that by not loading all tabs except the active one. tabs are then loaded when they are opened.
  - zerr 8y ago
    I know but ff startup is still slow, including warm.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  Try Brave developer edition. It’s now built on chromium. So far it’s been very stable for me and amazingly fast (plus privacy benefits). I no longer use Chrome or Firefox at all.
walkingolof 8y ago
The Vivaldi (Vivaldi.com) browser is what Opera would have been if the 12 linage had continued into this day.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 8y ago
  I doubt that Opera would've become a poorly performing browser with UI built with node.js.
  - walkingolof 8y ago
    I use it everyday and find its features and compability !
stinos 8y ago
Having used Opera for many years this sounded intriguing. After playing around with it for a bit, less so. Ok it got the mouse gestures, thanks, but for the rest: lots of small quirks which make it feel way too alpha (UI looks messy, different colors for menu bars and address bar/tabs, search box is pretty small, seems to use multiple icon themes or so, buttons with text clipped, ALT-D goes to address bar but doesn't select all text, the new tab page doesn't show icons nor tile images nor address so you have to hover to find out what a tie does, ...), doesn't feel particularly fast, and it doesn't have mail which was like the single thing making me stick with Opera for too long :P Apart from that it's pretty cool nonetheless, and good that people still remember the proper Opera of back in the days.
- pferde 8y ago
  Perhaps report your findings to the developers, to potentially have them fixed?
aphextron 8y ago
The problem I really have with all these alternative browsers is one of trust. It always comes down to just blindly trusting the signed binaries posted online by "some internet guy" on a random website. Even Chromium suffers from this. For an application which I will be entering credit card details, social security numbers, and all other imaginable form of private data, this is non-negotiable.
- drdaeman 8y ago
  I believe it's not exactly correct to separate browsers and non-browsers this way. On desktop systems, a malicious program typically can access most data from the other applications. Personally, saw a few non-browser programs that had an "extra functionality" that swept the drives and phoned back home - and never saw a browser with malicious extras (except for third-party browser extensions). Not saying this couldn't happen, just that I feel that direct approach is somewhat less likely.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    One browser that does phone home is UC Browser[0]. I agree with you though, you don't truly know what will happen when you install any application on your desktop without proper inspection. With so many security researchers out there I'm surprised they don't inspect software for that kind of thing and do public reviews, and showcase evidence of phoning home without consent / notifying the end-user in an obvious fashion. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Looks nice, their front-page really could use some pagination love, I shouldn't get more than 10 weeks worth of updates on 1 page. I have to scroll all the way to the bottom before I can see the FAQ which is something I'd want immediately available without having to scroll down too far, or on it's own page, otherwise people will just think they don't even have an FAQ.

109 points by bjoko 8y ago

fxfan 8y ago

I couldn't find any mention of rendering engine or capabilities and plugin system.

kkarakk 8y ago
opera 12.x FOSS version spinoff
- lucideer 8y ago
  Opera 12 rendering engine was entirely closed source, so a FOSS spinoff isn't possible. This is mainly working on recreating the UI experience only, with a very different rendering engine.
  - signal11 8y ago
    Interesting - I’ll try it out, quite curious to see how it compares with Vivaldi, which has an Opera-like UI with the Chromium engine.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      Otter predates Vivaldi (at least publicly)—I think Otter started very very soon after Opera 12 was discontinued. It's also open source (which imo was Opera's downfall), and uses an engine that is not the dominant one on the market (albeit a close cousin); I think both of these points are on its favour. On the other hand, Vivaldi seems to have more resources behind it, as well as the name of Jon von Tetzchner, which helps adoption. It just seems to be making the same mistakes Opera did (closed source, so the community can never bring it forward independently), with the added downside of being really no different from the market leader under the hood (rendering).
      - Jitnaught_ 8y ago
        Vivaldi's source code is available https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/
        em-bee 8y ago
        interesting, like the poster above i am fairly certain to remember that vivaldi was closed source at one point. i could not find any mention of the license anywhere on the site, so i dug it out of the source archive to find a 3-clause BSD license. very nice!
        lucideer 8y ago
        Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.
        em-bee 8y ago
        it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that. it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories EDIT: the README contains this: Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms. those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.
        vatueil 8y ago
        According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it): https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ > Is Vivaldi Open Source? > Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package. > In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit. > Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits This reddit comment explains in a bit more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_vivaldi_completely_opensource/de8h5kr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_v...
dchest 8y ago
QTWebKit (and experimental QtWebEngine based on Chromium)

warpech 8y ago

Screenshots: https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/ https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/

vfclists 8y ago
I find open source websites which can't provide a simple slideshow for viewing screenshots very depressing. Do these developers seriously expect interested viewers to click back and forth just to see their graphics?
- stonogo 8y ago
  This is the first time I've ever heard 'clicking a mouse button' declared an egregious violation of the user's effort. Is this a widespread concern? How do you use the web?
  - Markoff 8y ago
    most of the people nowadays surf from mobile

nkkollaw 8y ago

My problem with alternative browsers is that I'm locked-in because of a few plugins, and I cannot be bother reinstalling all settings and plugins (including plugin settings) when I change computer. Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me. Otherwise, it's hard.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
catacombs 8y ago
> Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me. Firefox does this, no?
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  Yup. I did use if for a while.
walterbell 8y ago
Brave can use Chrome plugins. No tracking, optional Tor.

mda 8y ago

It is admirable that they took on this job, but I would probably stay away from it for serious things because of security aspect. Modern browsers (Chrome - Firefox) are probably a much safer choice.

amelius 8y ago
On the other hand, browsers with a large user base are a more likely/profitable target for hacking.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  > A system or component relying on obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that if the flaws are not known, that will be sufficient to prevent a successful attack. Security experts have rejected this view as far back as 1851, and advise that obscurity should never be the only security mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
  - boffinism 8y ago
    Security through obscurity is bad, but the original comment wasn't about security through obscurity in that sense.
- mkl 8y ago
  This is Chromium-based, so is part of the largest user base, and because it's downstream it will always be at least a bit out of date. I think there are lots of useful things alternative browsers could do, and I'd like to see some succeed, but this problem seems difficult to get around.
pard68 8y ago
I don't think that is a reason to not attempt developing new things. And anyways, this is using the QTWebKit, my understanding is most of the security related aspects are from there. Since it is a fork of WebKit I imagine it gets security updates from there.

abrowne 8y ago

There's also Falkon, now a KDE project, which I prefer. The UI is more like Firefox, and it's QtWebEngine-only, which is maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days. https://www.falkon.org/ https://www.falkon.org/

kodablah 8y ago
> maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days Seems somewhat revived/maintained by annulen [0] as pointed out in these release notes. Also, QtWebEngine seems to usually be behind a Chromium version or two which, among other reasons, is why I use CEF in my Qt-based browser (granted I'm behind a couple versions on public releases, but that's my fault). 0 - https://github.com/annulen/webkit/tree/master https://github.com/annulen/webkit/tree/master
- abrowne 8y ago
  Yes, that QtWebKit revival is interesting and worth watching. I haven't followed, but I'm still not sure if it's up-to-date. This blog post from a WebKitGTK+ (with a section about QtWebKit) developer from 2017 is the best info I could find: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/08/06/endgame-for-webkit-woes/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/08/06/endgame-for-we... And yes, QtWebEngine does not keep up with Chromium, but it is updated to some degree. I wish Qt and distros could at least keep better up-to-date with security fixes, but it's easier said than done!

zerr 8y ago

The only reason I prefer Chrome over competitors is the speed of startup (including cold) even with lots of open tabs. I close and start the browser many times and so far nothing beats Chrome.

em-bee 8y ago
firefox solves that by not loading all tabs except the active one. tabs are then loaded when they are opened.
- zerr 8y ago
  I know but ff startup is still slow, including warm.
gnicholas 8y ago
Try Brave developer edition. It’s now built on chromium. So far it’s been very stable for me and amazingly fast (plus privacy benefits). I no longer use Chrome or Firefox at all.

walkingolof 8y ago

The Vivaldi (Vivaldi.com) browser is what Opera would have been if the 12 linage had continued into this day.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 8y ago
I doubt that Opera would've become a poorly performing browser with UI built with node.js.
- walkingolof 8y ago
  I use it everyday and find its features and compability !

stinos 8y ago

Having used Opera for many years this sounded intriguing. After playing around with it for a bit, less so. Ok it got the mouse gestures, thanks, but for the rest: lots of small quirks which make it feel way too alpha (UI looks messy, different colors for menu bars and address bar/tabs, search box is pretty small, seems to use multiple icon themes or so, buttons with text clipped, ALT-D goes to address bar but doesn't select all text, the new tab page doesn't show icons nor tile images nor address so you have to hover to find out what a tie does, ...), doesn't feel particularly fast, and it doesn't have mail which was like the single thing making me stick with Opera for too long :P Apart from that it's pretty cool nonetheless, and good that people still remember the proper Opera of back in the days.

pferde 8y ago
Perhaps report your findings to the developers, to potentially have them fixed?

aphextron 8y ago

The problem I really have with all these alternative browsers is one of trust. It always comes down to just blindly trusting the signed binaries posted online by "some internet guy" on a random website. Even Chromium suffers from this. For an application which I will be entering credit card details, social security numbers, and all other imaginable form of private data, this is non-negotiable.

drdaeman 8y ago
I believe it's not exactly correct to separate browsers and non-browsers this way. On desktop systems, a malicious program typically can access most data from the other applications. Personally, saw a few non-browser programs that had an "extra functionality" that swept the drives and phoned back home - and never saw a browser with malicious extras (except for third-party browser extensions). Not saying this couldn't happen, just that I feel that direct approach is somewhat less likely.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  One browser that does phone home is UC Browser[0]. I agree with you though, you don't truly know what will happen when you install any application on your desktop without proper inspection. With so many security researchers out there I'm surprised they don't inspect software for that kind of thing and do public reviews, and showcase evidence of phoning home without consent / notifying the end-user in an obvious fashion. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Looks nice, their front-page really could use some pagination love, I shouldn't get more than 10 weeks worth of updates on 1 page. I have to scroll all the way to the bottom before I can see the FAQ which is something I'd want immediately available without having to scroll down too far, or on it's own page, otherwise people will just think they don't even have an FAQ.