5 ms·

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those t

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful. Browser design by committee. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86d6311970b-pi.png https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02...

RussianCow 5y ago
> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful. Maybe it's been designed specifically for that 0.1%? There's nothing wrong with not catering to the masses.
- drcongo 5y ago
  Yeah, sorry, wasn't meaning to hate on Vivaldi. I'm sure it's great for those who want those features.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    Usually folks on HN are mad when they cater to the masses and ignore the 0.1% power-users. Can't win.
kunagi7 5y ago
There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium). I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend. Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to customize most of their browser. Themes, buttons, custom CSS, even side menu options. Even if they have improved it quite a bit there's still a performance hit.
- drcongo 5y ago
  I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit on performance there too, ie: when opening a new tab the UI lag is as bad as Chrome. Vivaldi takes it to an extreme, and obviously gets the extreme UI lag that goes with that. I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.
  - the_other 5y ago
    Safari user here too. It's great. Admittedly, I'm fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy my laptop and phone operating as two views on the same computing state, so I'm biased... but Safari renders very nicely, has minimal UI, runs fast and I like it a lot. I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.
    - drcongo 5y ago
      I'm on the Monterey tab design, and it's hit and miss. First time using it I was wondering what the fuss was about wrt knowing which was the active tab, it seemed fairly clear to me. However, I've since seen states where the active tab is lighter than the others (it is right now) and other times where the active tab is darker than the others (definitely happens in a private window) - the lack of consistency is the biggest problem with it. Also, it's _really_ hard to tell if you're in a private window on the latest Safari.
      - handrous 5y ago
        The chrome color-changing is obnoxious and plainly harms UX, and the design is weirdly wasteful of pixels for something that looks like it was intended to save space. It also continues the flattifying trend of making it impossible to distinguish individual interactive elements unless you're looking directly at them—gimme buttons, depth, and contrast, damnit. And that's after switching it to the more-classic-like version that keeps the URL bar separate. The tab groups are sort of cool, but they're bugged for me (opening a link in a new tab results in a blank tab, after briefly displaying the intended content after I switch to it, but only in named groups, not in the default unnamed tab group) and their relationship or lack of relationship with windows keeps throwing me off. Overall this feels like something the window manager should handle, in some fashion, though I admit existing features aren't quite enough to cover what it does. It also seems like the whole concept needs to be integrated with bookmarks. All in all, good direction, but something's still missing. Oh, and I also forget to switch to them, so haven't used them at all since about the first week after initially setting a few useful ones up. I need a way to at least tell Safari to open tabs for certain sites in certain tab groups, regardless of where I start to load them. Otherwise I end up with the same 100+ tabs in the unnamed tab group as I always have.
LinAGKar 5y ago
That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.
bogwog 5y ago
Vivaldi is clearly for power users, but you're definitely exaggerating. It's not that complicated, and performance is fine. Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.
brnt 5y ago
On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
It is odd. Also harder to trust a small org. Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.
tomrod 5y ago
Its mobile browser is fantastic. Much better than Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, IMHO.
throw10920 5y ago
> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load I'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?
ochronus 5y ago
+1 - I _really_ wanted to like Vivaldi, but... no.
chimen 5y ago
Switch browsers then, you have alternatives. Nothing wrong with what they do, this is not the way to appreciate free stuff. We're not in 2003 when IE was your only tool. Are we offended by too many options now? I want a rendering engine with adblocker and a mail client blended in. Most of my time is spent in a browser when I'm online so, for me, it makes sense for my browser to be as capable as it can.
y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
I've been using Vivaldi for at least a couple of years now - strictly for banking - and I fully agree on the slowness of the application. It's awful. I came from the original Opera (before it transferred ownership) and I loved the UI/UX and performance of it. I was hoping Vivaldi would replicate that, but it's been an enormous pain in the ass lately with websites either not loading (they work fine in Firefox and Chrome), tabs crashing spontaneously, the app crashing spontaneously, and the horrid performance. These issues seem to occur across my different other laptops also. I use it exclusively for banking as I said, so it's only used once or twice a month but I would never use Vivaldi on a regular basis with the way it currently works. I will say though, I really like their mobile app so far. There was a weird tab duplication bug on it earlier in the year and they fixed it really quick, but outside of that it's been pretty great.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> I want a rendering engine and some tabs Even tabs don't have to be a thing for an app (e.g. a web browser) to manage. A good window manager could tabify anything. This would require a standardized API for windows to expose the opened view URIs to be really good in replacing app-level tabs though.
Tomis02 5y ago
> making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Everything you think you gain in speed in Chrome/Firefox, you instantly lose when having to deal with their oversimplified UX. Vivaldi's focus on features means that I can easily manage and switch between tens of tabs - having an equivalent functionality on other browsers via extensions is both very slow and clunky, and the simple act of switching between two tabs is annoyingly unergonomic. By using Vivaldi I must've gained so far entire days of life that would've been otherwise lost by blindly ctrl-tabbing my way to the desired tab.
selfhoster11 5y ago
It seems like it's just not a browser for you. There are a lot of Chromium based browsers with a lot simpler UIs for those that seek that.

RussianCow 5y ago

> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful. Maybe it's been designed specifically for that 0.1%? There's nothing wrong with not catering to the masses.

drcongo 5y ago
Yeah, sorry, wasn't meaning to hate on Vivaldi. I'm sure it's great for those who want those features.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Usually folks on HN are mad when they cater to the masses and ignore the 0.1% power-users. Can't win.

kunagi7 5y ago

There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium). I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend. Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to customize most of their browser. Themes, buttons, custom CSS, even side menu options. Even if they have improved it quite a bit there's still a performance hit.

drcongo 5y ago
I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit on performance there too, ie: when opening a new tab the UI lag is as bad as Chrome. Vivaldi takes it to an extreme, and obviously gets the extreme UI lag that goes with that. I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.
- the_other 5y ago
  Safari user here too. It's great. Admittedly, I'm fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy my laptop and phone operating as two views on the same computing state, so I'm biased... but Safari renders very nicely, has minimal UI, runs fast and I like it a lot. I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.
  - drcongo 5y ago
    I'm on the Monterey tab design, and it's hit and miss. First time using it I was wondering what the fuss was about wrt knowing which was the active tab, it seemed fairly clear to me. However, I've since seen states where the active tab is lighter than the others (it is right now) and other times where the active tab is darker than the others (definitely happens in a private window) - the lack of consistency is the biggest problem with it. Also, it's _really_ hard to tell if you're in a private window on the latest Safari.
    - handrous 5y ago
      The chrome color-changing is obnoxious and plainly harms UX, and the design is weirdly wasteful of pixels for something that looks like it was intended to save space. It also continues the flattifying trend of making it impossible to distinguish individual interactive elements unless you're looking directly at them—gimme buttons, depth, and contrast, damnit. And that's after switching it to the more-classic-like version that keeps the URL bar separate. The tab groups are sort of cool, but they're bugged for me (opening a link in a new tab results in a blank tab, after briefly displaying the intended content after I switch to it, but only in named groups, not in the default unnamed tab group) and their relationship or lack of relationship with windows keeps throwing me off. Overall this feels like something the window manager should handle, in some fashion, though I admit existing features aren't quite enough to cover what it does. It also seems like the whole concept needs to be integrated with bookmarks. All in all, good direction, but something's still missing. Oh, and I also forget to switch to them, so haven't used them at all since about the first week after initially setting a few useful ones up. I need a way to at least tell Safari to open tabs for certain sites in certain tab groups, regardless of where I start to load them. Otherwise I end up with the same 100+ tabs in the unnamed tab group as I always have.

LinAGKar 5y ago

That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.

bogwog 5y ago

Vivaldi is clearly for power users, but you're definitely exaggerating. It's not that complicated, and performance is fine. Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.

brnt 5y ago

On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

It is odd. Also harder to trust a small org. Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.

tomrod 5y ago

Its mobile browser is fantastic. Much better than Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, IMHO.

throw10920 5y ago

> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load I'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?

ochronus 5y ago

+1 - I _really_ wanted to like Vivaldi, but... no.

chimen 5y ago

Switch browsers then, you have alternatives. Nothing wrong with what they do, this is not the way to appreciate free stuff. We're not in 2003 when IE was your only tool. Are we offended by too many options now? I want a rendering engine with adblocker and a mail client blended in. Most of my time is spent in a browser when I'm online so, for me, it makes sense for my browser to be as capable as it can.

y-c-o-m-b 5y ago

I've been using Vivaldi for at least a couple of years now - strictly for banking - and I fully agree on the slowness of the application. It's awful. I came from the original Opera (before it transferred ownership) and I loved the UI/UX and performance of it. I was hoping Vivaldi would replicate that, but it's been an enormous pain in the ass lately with websites either not loading (they work fine in Firefox and Chrome), tabs crashing spontaneously, the app crashing spontaneously, and the horrid performance. These issues seem to occur across my different other laptops also. I use it exclusively for banking as I said, so it's only used once or twice a month but I would never use Vivaldi on a regular basis with the way it currently works. I will say though, I really like their mobile app so far. There was a weird tab duplication bug on it earlier in the year and they fixed it really quick, but outside of that it's been pretty great.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> I want a rendering engine and some tabs Even tabs don't have to be a thing for an app (e.g. a web browser) to manage. A good window manager could tabify anything. This would require a standardized API for windows to expose the opened view URIs to be really good in replacing app-level tabs though.

Tomis02 5y ago

> making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Everything you think you gain in speed in Chrome/Firefox, you instantly lose when having to deal with their oversimplified UX. Vivaldi's focus on features means that I can easily manage and switch between tens of tabs - having an equivalent functionality on other browsers via extensions is both very slow and clunky, and the simple act of switching between two tabs is annoyingly unergonomic. By using Vivaldi I must've gained so far entire days of life that would've been otherwise lost by blindly ctrl-tabbing my way to the desired tab.

selfhoster11 5y ago

It seems like it's just not a browser for you. There are a lot of Chromium based browsers with a lot simpler UIs for those that seek that.