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In many ways, opting for Chromium was a poor choice by Vivaldi as it turned off many people from it due to Google's privacy invasive practice, and overall bad r

In many ways, opting for Chromium was a poor choice by Vivaldi as it turned off many people from it due to Google's privacy invasive practice, and overall bad reputation in this area. These fears turned out to be even more true after Google integrated and intertwined Chrome with more of its services, and even went so far to cripple ad-blockers on it. It's also resource hog. They should have opted for Webkit (or even Gecko, even though their code base is a mess). They also need to dump their Web UI and switch to native UI of the OS. I really miss Opera (pre-blink version).

toper-centage 6y ago
The biggest mistake of the decade from Mozilla was to not invest in extracting and encapsulating Firefox's rendering and js engines. Creating a Firefox clone is very hard. Well established browsers like PaleMoon are cursed to lag gehind Firefox because of that.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  That was a feature, not a bug - once the millions of dollars started pouring in, they weren't really interested in anyone taking their code and building competing browsers with it.
rasz 6y ago
I think Vivaldi is js/react shop right now. They have problems anytime a bug in native code pops up, like video codecs. Windows 7 video decoding has been partially broken for 3 years now with no fixes in sight, Big Sur video decoding is also broken. Chromium was a safe bet, and js lets them iterate fast, but the quality of code in their Web UI leaves a lot to be desired. Still, they are the only game in town when it comes to browsers you can just inject your code to change UI on the fly, modding it to your heart content. As a bonus they have no problem ripping out all of Google tracking/spying code. My biggest problem with Vivaldi is the interface between developers and users. They have no QA to speak of (repeatedly reintroducing same bugs, claiming to fix something while its not fixed, introducing trivial bugs with new features, failing to reproduce most bugs), most likely no automated unit testing, and no public accessible bug tracking system. The way you report bugs is, I shit you not: - fill out a form - receive random number - receive single automated confirmation - post in obscure thread on their forum to ask for some Vivaldi employee to MANUALLY check what is happening with said bug from time to time. As you can imagine not very conductive to a healthy development process, not to mention costing them a ton of time wasted on duplicates and replication time. Imo this, together with recent move to remove Vivaldi from UA string are business decisions aimed at obscuring how they are doing. Internal company structures, not showing how (not)many employees they have, speed of development, company trajectory, user traction, deployment numbers, etc.

toper-centage 6y ago

The biggest mistake of the decade from Mozilla was to not invest in extracting and encapsulating Firefox's rendering and js engines. Creating a Firefox clone is very hard. Well established browsers like PaleMoon are cursed to lag gehind Firefox because of that.

webmobdev 6y ago
That was a feature, not a bug - once the millions of dollars started pouring in, they weren't really interested in anyone taking their code and building competing browsers with it.

rasz 6y ago

I think Vivaldi is js/react shop right now. They have problems anytime a bug in native code pops up, like video codecs. Windows 7 video decoding has been partially broken for 3 years now with no fixes in sight, Big Sur video decoding is also broken. Chromium was a safe bet, and js lets them iterate fast, but the quality of code in their Web UI leaves a lot to be desired. Still, they are the only game in town when it comes to browsers you can just inject your code to change UI on the fly, modding it to your heart content. As a bonus they have no problem ripping out all of Google tracking/spying code. My biggest problem with Vivaldi is the interface between developers and users. They have no QA to speak of (repeatedly reintroducing same bugs, claiming to fix something while its not fixed, introducing trivial bugs with new features, failing to reproduce most bugs), most likely no automated unit testing, and no public accessible bug tracking system. The way you report bugs is, I shit you not: - fill out a form - receive random number - receive single automated confirmation - post in obscure thread on their forum to ask for some Vivaldi employee to MANUALLY check what is happening with said bug from time to time. As you can imagine not very conductive to a healthy development process, not to mention costing them a ton of time wasted on duplicates and replication time. Imo this, together with recent move to remove Vivaldi from UA string are business decisions aimed at obscuring how they are doing. Internal company structures, not showing how (not)many employees they have, speed of development, company trajectory, user traction, deployment numbers, etc.