4 ms·

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 (tha

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.

thefz 5y ago
To me tab tiling is invaluable. I just wish it had session syncing, that would be great. I use Vivaldi a lot.
- thunderbong 5y ago
  Vivaldi does have session syncing.
hulitu 5y ago
Also Vivaldi is faster.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  I find this statement a bit puzzling. Vivaldi is the slowest browser I've tried in recent years. The couple times I used it I always went back to Firefox after a few weeks because I couldn't stand the sluggish UI anymore. Maybe it improved by now, but I find it hard to believe it's now supposed to be faster after Firefox' massive performance updates.
  - salmo 5y ago
    It’s weird how this cycles. Firebird/Firefox was originally an amazingly light browser (discounting some niche Linux ones that embedded Gecko). Then it got huge, and Chrome was amazing. And it seemed impossible for FF to be able to work out the technical debt. Now Chrome often makes the fan kick in on my MBP and Firefox is lighter again in CPU and memory. I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this machine, but I just don’t enjoy using it. Not sure why. Maybe I’m old and it’s just change. Sadly, I did hit my first work website that only worked in Chrome this week. No FF, no Safari.
    - toyg 5y ago
      > I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this machine, but I just don’t enjoy using it Safari always gives me the feeling of being too basic. The extension ecosystem is very small, and settings panels try their hardest not to actually give you any options beyond the essential ones. It's a browser for people who endure the web, not enjoy it.
      - handrous 5y ago
        Safari's respect for battery life and ability to limit the harm a misbehaving/disrespectful tab (which is lots of them, these days) can do to overall system responsiveness are what keep me using it, and those definitely help me enjoy the web, to the extent that it can be enjoyed anymore. It's the best at both of those of any major browser I'm aware of, and in fact I don't know any that are even close—something like Surf might match or beat it, I guess, being very small and using the WebKit as the rendering engine, but I wouldn't bet on it. [EDIT] but yes, FF and Chrome/Chromium destroy it on a feature basis. I just value those other things so much, and both of those options are so bad at those things, that I prefer Safari anyway.
      - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
        I don't think your last sentence is a particularly generous summation. :) Maybe I'm an anomaly in the HN crowd, but I never really got into extensions even when I was using Firefox or Chrome as a daily driver. I have an extension for 1Password, an extension for a read-it-later service (for years Instapaper, lately GoodLinks), and somewhat grudgingly, an ad blocker. And sometimes a user style sheet extension. I've tried other extensions at various points and they've never really stuck, not even the "vertical tab" style extensions that I want to love but always find ugly and distracting. (OmniWeb, RIP, is the only browser I ever used that had what I thought was a great implementation of this.) And I use Chrome daily at work now, because there are a few internal sites that require it (and one that inexplicably requires IE 10, which Chrome turns out to be better at faking than Safari), and... it's fine? But it feels just a little slower, it's harder on the battery, and there's very little about it that I miss when I'm back in Safari on my personal Mac. Maybe if I was deep into web development again, this would change, since Safari's dev tools always seem to be a few steps behind Chrome's. Maybe there's some magic can't-live-without extension I could find on Chrome or Firefox that would sway me to stick with one for the long haul. But for years, I've enjoyed the web, and I've enjoyed it on Safari. [shrug emoji]
kjakm 5y ago
I hadn't even thought of tab tiling as a feature I might need until now. Just took a look and seems incredibly useful!
- Seirdy 5y ago
  If you want tabs and tiling in every program, you should give a tiling WM like Sway or i3 a try ;). We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.
sirius87 5y ago
Same. Huge fan of Opera 12, I was active in their community sites and reported bugs when possible. I'm glad to see them all coming back. I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great! It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).
- Bayart 5y ago
  >may have to re-patch after every browser update I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.
  - sirius87 5y ago
    I'm on an Ubuntu based system, so an apt-get Post-Invoke hook would do the job for me [1]. I haven't bothered though. I just manually run a bash script that appends my !important changes to the end of the file. But apparently there's an official way to apply CSS mods using vivaldi://experiments/ and Settings > Appearance [1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-a-script-command-to-apt-get-upgrade-command/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-a-scr...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

thefz 5y ago

To me tab tiling is invaluable. I just wish it had session syncing, that would be great. I use Vivaldi a lot.

thunderbong 5y ago
Vivaldi does have session syncing.

hulitu 5y ago

Also Vivaldi is faster.

alpaca128 5y ago
I find this statement a bit puzzling. Vivaldi is the slowest browser I've tried in recent years. The couple times I used it I always went back to Firefox after a few weeks because I couldn't stand the sluggish UI anymore. Maybe it improved by now, but I find it hard to believe it's now supposed to be faster after Firefox' massive performance updates.
- salmo 5y ago
  It’s weird how this cycles. Firebird/Firefox was originally an amazingly light browser (discounting some niche Linux ones that embedded Gecko). Then it got huge, and Chrome was amazing. And it seemed impossible for FF to be able to work out the technical debt. Now Chrome often makes the fan kick in on my MBP and Firefox is lighter again in CPU and memory. I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this machine, but I just don’t enjoy using it. Not sure why. Maybe I’m old and it’s just change. Sadly, I did hit my first work website that only worked in Chrome this week. No FF, no Safari.
  - toyg 5y ago
    > I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this machine, but I just don’t enjoy using it Safari always gives me the feeling of being too basic. The extension ecosystem is very small, and settings panels try their hardest not to actually give you any options beyond the essential ones. It's a browser for people who endure the web, not enjoy it.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Safari's respect for battery life and ability to limit the harm a misbehaving/disrespectful tab (which is lots of them, these days) can do to overall system responsiveness are what keep me using it, and those definitely help me enjoy the web, to the extent that it can be enjoyed anymore. It's the best at both of those of any major browser I'm aware of, and in fact I don't know any that are even close—something like Surf might match or beat it, I guess, being very small and using the WebKit as the rendering engine, but I wouldn't bet on it. [EDIT] but yes, FF and Chrome/Chromium destroy it on a feature basis. I just value those other things so much, and both of those options are so bad at those things, that I prefer Safari anyway.
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      I don't think your last sentence is a particularly generous summation. :) Maybe I'm an anomaly in the HN crowd, but I never really got into extensions even when I was using Firefox or Chrome as a daily driver. I have an extension for 1Password, an extension for a read-it-later service (for years Instapaper, lately GoodLinks), and somewhat grudgingly, an ad blocker. And sometimes a user style sheet extension. I've tried other extensions at various points and they've never really stuck, not even the "vertical tab" style extensions that I want to love but always find ugly and distracting. (OmniWeb, RIP, is the only browser I ever used that had what I thought was a great implementation of this.) And I use Chrome daily at work now, because there are a few internal sites that require it (and one that inexplicably requires IE 10, which Chrome turns out to be better at faking than Safari), and... it's fine? But it feels just a little slower, it's harder on the battery, and there's very little about it that I miss when I'm back in Safari on my personal Mac. Maybe if I was deep into web development again, this would change, since Safari's dev tools always seem to be a few steps behind Chrome's. Maybe there's some magic can't-live-without extension I could find on Chrome or Firefox that would sway me to stick with one for the long haul. But for years, I've enjoyed the web, and I've enjoyed it on Safari. [shrug emoji]

kjakm 5y ago

I hadn't even thought of tab tiling as a feature I might need until now. Just took a look and seems incredibly useful!

Seirdy 5y ago
If you want tabs and tiling in every program, you should give a tiling WM like Sway or i3 a try ;). We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.

sirius87 5y ago

Same. Huge fan of Opera 12, I was active in their community sites and reported bugs when possible. I'm glad to see them all coming back. I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great! It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).

Bayart 5y ago
>may have to re-patch after every browser update I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.
- sirius87 5y ago
  I'm on an Ubuntu based system, so an apt-get Post-Invoke hook would do the job for me [1]. I haven't bothered though. I just manually run a bash script that appends my !important changes to the end of the file. But apparently there's an official way to apply CSS mods using vivaldi://experiments/ and Settings > Appearance [1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-a-script-command-to-apt-get-upgrade-command/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-a-scr...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]