14 ms·

Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends

352 points by vetler 12y ago

danboarder 12y ago
Looks good, not sure about the nav changing color to match website styles but that is an interesting approach. Having mail built in is not useful for me, but I wonder if it will support other email providers eventually (gmail etc)?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wanda 12y ago
  I don't like it either. I mean it wouldn't bother me that much, it's not a dealbreaker, but it's the kind of minor thing that would prevent me from switching to this browser unless it offers something genuinely advantageous over the existing solutions. But, just fyi, you can switch off the color changing. At least in this preview release.
- matmann2001 12y ago
  It will likely be a mail client, which will support POP and IMAP compatible mail providers. I'm assuming this on the basis that they features they are looking to implement were part of the old Opera featureset, which included a mail client.
- raphman_ 12y ago
  M2, the mail client in Opera 12, was one of the main reasons why I stuck to it for a long time. It was quite usable and seems to be the only mail client which properly supports custom IMAP flags (== tags).
albertzeyer 12y ago
I would like some more information. Like what engine is this based on? What JS engine? And I guess the source will not be open? (Why?) Edit: Some more info here: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-browser-former-ceo-opera/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-brows... Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine. I wonder about the differences to Opera then. Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the "Web technology" tab): We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web. So it's like http://breach.cc/ http://breach.cc/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152) then?
- quarterto 12y ago
  Since it seems to use atom-shell for the UI[1], it's likely Chromium. [1]: https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4 https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4
  - Maakuth 12y ago
    User agent provides further evidence, mine reports to be Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36
- gorm 12y ago
  Most of the UI is based on React. But we use a lot of open source projects. If you run it you should visit vivaldi://credits
  - mjg59 12y ago
    It's cool that you use a lot of open source projects. But some of them are under licenses that require the user to be able to download their source code, and it's not obvious right now where (for instance) your Webkit code is. You should probably fix that.
    - mjg59 12y ago
      And as an aside - if you're linking LGPLed material into a static binary (as you appear to be doing with Webkit), you need to follow the provisions of section 6(a) of LGPL 2.1 and provide object files that allow the recipient to re-link the binary with a modified copy of the LGPLed work.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    According to that, it seems that Vivaldi uses a lot of GPL'd and LGPL'd libraries, and it's not clear that Vivaldi is in compliance with the copyleft requirements of those licenses, nor is it apparent which license Vivaldi is released under as well (be it a FOSS license, some EULA, etc.). There are also a lot of libraries listed that are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. Distributing this therefore might not actually be legal, regardless of whether or not it's released under a FOSS license, since those two license families have conflicting requirements for derived works (including works which use those libraries). YMMV, IANAL, etc., but this thing's running the risk of legal technicalities killing it in the crib.
jarcane 12y ago
Color me interested. I'm currently fed up with more or less the entire current crop of browsers, so it would be nice to see a new serious player with some experience enter the field. Old Opera was a fantastic suite in its day, but new Opera is little more than a buggy hack of Chrome.
- foooh 12y ago
  The new Opera is far more than a buggy hack of Chrome. It has a new user interface which isn't actually buggy.
  - jarcane 12y ago
    A new interface which offers less functionality than either Chrome or Opera 12 (it can't even export your bloody bookmarks FFS), constantly locks up and becomes unresponsive for half-minutes or more at a time after simple actions, and largely wastes its breath on visual features like the new bookmarks manager which manage to be deliberately less functional than almost any other possible interface. It's not as bad as Firefox though.
gchokov 12y ago
I am wondering, how did these guys got that domain name. I think such domains should be used for what they are supposed to - Vivaldi, and not some random beta browser (although it might be pretty good!). Too much hype put in the wrong place these days :(
chaotic-good 12y ago
It is possible to search using address bar and separate search bar, why not to join them?
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  In most (all?) browsers with a unified search bar, your search query may be confused with a URL and breaks your search. There's usually some syntax you can throw at the front to disambiguate, but I'd rather not have to think about whether my query is going to work or not -- especially with new TLDs rolling out all the time. I much appreciate the separate search bar as a result.
  - gcb0 12y ago
    but for the browser owners*, every time your url is misinterpreted as a search they win search revenue.
    - matmann2001 12y ago
      I guess not every browser is willing to sacrifice convenience for revenue.
  - ponyous 12y ago
    In classic Opera browser if you prefixed your search query with a letter it always searched with engine associated with the letter. For example: `g thisissearch.com` would be interpreted as Google search query, not url. I think this is good behaviour.
    - nieve 12y ago
      There are two different ways to do this in Firefox with no addons or weird configs: Open Preferences->Search->One-click Search Engines, make sure google is checked, double-click "google" in the keyword column, change it to just "g". If you want to keep the old "google" term or outright disable Google as a built-in search engine you can still add "g" as a keyword search. Go to Google, right click the search box, select "Add a Keyword for this Search..." and select "g" as your keyword. This works for search forms on most sites that aren't doing insane stuff with javascript or mandating a security token and it generally remembers other form settings as well.
chaotic-good 12y ago
UI looks really cool though a little bit alien on ubuntu.
- pmontra 12y ago
  It looks definitely out of place on Ubuntu (a Gnome fallback desktop here.) It looks like something ported from a Windows 8 desktop and it ignores the system setting for the color of the title bar. I also wonder why they are implementing an integrated mail client. It seems a waste of developer time which could be spent on something more important. That said, the browser is pretty fast. Chances that I'll use it: maybe, but not as primary browser. I'm using FF with some vital addons as my primary browser (Firebug, NoScript, AdBlock, SelfDestructingCookies) and Opera/Blink as wordprocessor and spreadsheet on Google Drive, to separate concerns (customer mandated docs). I can't see me leaving FF for this (I didn't for Chrome) but it could end up replacing Opera if they keep it minimal.
anoother 12y ago
Tab stacks! Is this finally a replacement for Opera?
- mahouse 12y ago
  Yes, the UI is a clone. Memories :_)
owaislone 12y ago
Interesting but no HiDPI support (linux) so won't be able to use as daily driver and help test it.
- M4v3R 12y ago
  Works fine on retina MacbookPro with High DPI asets, though [0]. [0] http://i.imgur.com/eqVD5kF.png http://i.imgur.com/eqVD5kF.png
- Kiro 12y ago
  How does HiDPI work on Linux? Is everything scaled to twice the size like with retina?
  - hpaavola 12y ago
    Ubuntu has a slider that lets you to adjust the multiplier, see http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=0x2014&image=unity_hidpi_1_show&w=1920 http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=0x2014&image=unity_hidp... Not sure about other distros.
  - wooger 12y ago
    Gnome shell has support for HiDPI scaling buried in the Gnome Tweak Tool settings. Sadly, you can mess yourself up if you go exploring in there, see a slider, wonder what it does and give it a go. On a non-HiDPI display anyway!
- sibbl 12y ago
  works fine on 200dpi Windows as well.
nkuttler 12y ago
Well, I know I'm not your average user, but a website that only displays a spinner to noscript users doesn't exactly make me very confident that this browser will help to make a better www.
- phpnode 12y ago
  You have chosen to break your own web experience, I'm not sure why you're complaining.
  - nkuttler 12y ago
    When I started to use the web there were campaigns like best viewed in any browser, and the browser wars were just starting. I didn't realize that sharing my sentiment would be perceived as complaining. I know how to disable noscript.
    - drdaeman 12y ago
      The times had changed. Semantic Web is dead. Nobody anymore gives a damn about that, everyone's drunk the kool-aid of webapps. Everyone used to hate Flash, but it's perceived as normal when the pages are bundled a good chunk of rendering/layout engine to run inside your browser engine. Can't track you and serve you advertisements with plain hypertext documents, duh.
  - jiffytick 12y ago
    The issue here is not GP's browsing experience. It's the fact that they failed to address such an elementry UX usecase that should not have occured in the first place; eithrr degrade gracefully or use a noscript tag. This failure is unacceptable if they are the same folks who are working on the web browser, seeing that its UVP is mostly UX. No need to let your biases leak out when noscri.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    If they can't write a web page, why should I trust them to write a browser?
unfamiliar 12y ago
Looks good! I think the first thing you could do with is a public bug tracker/feature request system. I think the forum format is particularly badly suited to managing feature requests and tracking bugs.
eva1984 12y ago
Why there aren't any screenshots? One suggestion: 'A new browser for our friends' is nowhere a good introduction. It simply fails to explain to me the reason why I should care this in the first place.
pikzen 12y ago
Hey cool, a new bowser which seems function- oh for fucks sake it's goddamn node.js again. Stop this shit. I don't need a node runtime taking up 400MB on top of an already memory hungry browser. I don't need a browser using and abusing fucking javascript to run. Looks good though, and features seem interesting.
- rtpg 12y ago
  You do realise that node.js is basically just V8 right? You kind of need a Javascript runtime for your browser anyways. Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++
  - dchest 12y ago
    Also, Chromium has a Blink-in-JavaScript initiative: http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-in-js http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-in-js Blink-in-JavaScript is a mechanism to enable Blink developers to implement DOM features in JavaScript (instead of C++).
  - pikzen 12y ago
    >You do realise that node.js is basically just V8 right? Aside from the fact that I don't need a goddamn 400MB runtime running all the time, the major problem is that node.js (and javascript, by extension) are awful tools for anything desktop related. (Server related too, but that's more a personal opinion that node.js is cancer (hi ted)). Performance has never been up to par with C/C++ (no, testing a 100 line script is not a valid bench. No, comparing it against awful code is not a valid bench either. Which kinda invalidates 90% of node benchmarks.). But sure, let's trade a bit of performance for ease of use, I'm all for it. Except when that tradeoff implies using javascript, whose warts are known by anyone sensible. Having a single threaded architecture for a browser, which should basically be running one process/thread per tab is an error we shouldn't be doing anymore in 2015. I sure love one tab crashing my entire browser(hi firefox). Which I managed to do quickly with Vivaldi, but I can understand that it's still a beta. Also, let's ignore the OS's native UI libraries because atom-shell/whatever-desktop-lib-they-use chose to render the entire thing as a DOM because reasons. >Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++ Nowhere did I hold Chrome and Firefox in high regards when it comes to memory usage. Chrome seems to think that allocating 4GB of memory for 20ish tabs is a good idea. Firefox is a bit better but has this slight tendency to leak memory like crazy. tl;dr: browsers suck but that's not a reason to write one in fucking javascript awaiting the nodejs defense force
p0nce 12y ago
Please disable Javascript by default when browsing. It will be very fast.
gear54rus 12y ago
Tab stacks, cloned UI, tab previews, integrated mail. Someone is targeting Opera-like experience and damn, I like it. I am not sure about liking it being another incarnation of Chrome inside though.
- matmann2001 12y ago
  I think the people behind it are past Opera employees.
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    Yup, the majority of Vivaldi people are ex-Opera employees.
  - palmer_eldritch 12y ago
    In fact, Vivaldi's founder is Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, one of Opera's founders and ex-CEO of Opera. So I guess one could say there's a link between Opera and Vivaldi (no pun intended).
- gosukiwi 12y ago
  It just kills it for me that it's basically Chrome with a face-wash...
edwinjm 12y ago
Hmm, so it's not Open Source? So it's not a community effort? So the developers are paid? Then how are these expenses earned back?
- vetler 12y ago
  My guess is that it's funded by Opera Software co-founder and former Jon von Tetzchner for now, he should have some money left in the bank after leaving Opera.
chj 12y ago
Visit HN on this browser, you will see chrome UI adjusts its color theme automatically. Very impressive.
sonnyp 12y ago
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36 I think it's the first useragent string to contain 7 different browser/engine names.
- tzakrajs 12y ago
  Poor UserAgent... if only we knew...
- Yver 12y ago
  Opera has the same horrendous user-agent string, except with "OPR" instead of "Vivaldi".
- paulojreis 12y ago
  It's roughly the same as Chrome, plus the reference to Vivaldi. It's ugly, as any user-agent string is. The uglier beast, to my knowledge, is this one: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 520) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537 Windows Phone 8.1 Internet Explorer.
  - mynameisvlad 12y ago
    That one makes a little more sense. Some user agent detectors will look for Trident and assume it's an old version of IE and therefore not compatible. The more things you put in your UA string, the harder it'll be to fall into the "this is IE" bucket.
    - paulojreis 12y ago
      It serves a purpose, but (IMHO) makes no sense. Microsoft is trying to avoid UA-based blocking (e.g. Google once used this do block the Google Maps web app in Windows Phones) and styling (some sites only send the mobile version to webkit mobile browsers). Microsoft effectively masks its browser by changing the UA string to something which is detected as mobile Webkit, and this is (IMHO) wrong. Even if the site is "functional", a site owner should be able to opt to not support Windows Phones. Suppose you are responsible for a site which carries a heavy and valuable brand. Suppose you don't have/don't want to allocate the resources needed to correctly develop and test your site in Windows Phone. You don't know how the site will run: you won't know about bugs, you can't guarantee a solid user experience and you can't guarantee performance. Ergo, you might affect the brand you carry. Although not ideal, I think it is valid for someone to say "I want to block my site in some device/OS, because I can't guarantee the quality and it might be bad for my brand". I concede (and believe) that the end user should be able to circumvent these mechanisms by, e.g., changing the UA string. However, I don't agree with Microsoft approach of masquerading, by default, as Android and/or iOS browsers. Pardon my rant, but it's just Microsoft being Microsoft: bending standards at will and playing desperate when not it control of a given market.
monk_e_boy 12y ago
Nooooo! Forward/back and home buttons are all in different places to Firefox, IE and Chrome... gah! I wish they'd all use the same layout!
jblok 12y ago
"A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community? That seems like a lot of effort to build a browser for a very small group of users. The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. A lot of times that would be IE - lots of people I know/companies in the UK still use IE out of a lack of knowing any better. Some more savvy users will use Chrome/FF but that's because they realise it has a lot of benefits over IE or are shamed into not using IE. This doesn't really offer any 'wow' features that entice me as a web developer to try it, so your average user is even less likely to try it. And really, when making a browser, your target needs to be the masses because otherwise no web dev is going to support your browser if it requires even the tiniest of special treatment in their code.
- werid 12y ago
  In an interview with digi.no, they speak of feeling abandoned by Opera when they switched to their new chrome version, and that they weren't alone. Maybe that's their friends. Old Opera 12 users.
- Aqwis 12y ago
  >The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. Clearly not, as statistics show that IE is no longer the most popular browser in any country in Europe.
  - jblok 12y ago
    True, but this comes after many years and a monumental effort by Google, who are backed by huge financial resources.
    - malaporte 12y ago
      Indeed I remember seeing ads for Chrome on the Paris subway, back when it wasn't yet as ubiquitous as it is now.
- jarcane 12y ago
  "A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community? The "Opera community" is, or was, a thing. Opera spent years cultivating an actual community around their users, with forums and chat and social networking features galore. Then they shut it down last year. The Vivaldi folks have also started Vivaldi.net, which appears to be an attempt to keep that community going elsewhere now that Opera has essentially axed everything that made people love them in favor of being an also-ran Chromium fork.
sehr 12y ago
Opera creators using NPM & React to create a web browser. I love the future
hultner 12y ago
Tried it out, there are some problems with handling local hostnames. Tried visiting my localhost webserver but have to specify http:// http:// every time, even if I'm already on the site and just append something to the url it'll redirect me to google unless I first prepend http:// http://. It's rather annoying considering I only edited the already loaded URL. It's easily a deal breaker from a developer stance point.
- semperfaux 12y ago
  If it's actively removing the http:// http:// when you type it yourself, yes, I can see that. But then from a developer standpoint it only makes so much sense to develop using a browser with basically zero market share.
  - laumars 12y ago
    It's still just Blink under the hood. So the market share point is pretty moot at this point. Maybe as matures it will introduce it's own rendering features and then your point will have more credence.
- xrstf 12y ago
  Similar things happen in Chrome. This is why I jumped the shark and simply use fake domains with actual TLDs for local development stuff, e.g. "myproject.ninja" or "something.gg". With the advent of all those new TLDs, there should be one for you as well to designate as "this points to localhost". ;-)
  - hultner 12y ago
    I've had similar things happen in Chrome but in no way as intrusive and obnoxious, let say in Chrome if I change an existing url in the urlbar of localhost I'm taken to the correct site and not redirected to the google launch page.
  - Already__Taken 12y ago
    The only trick I've had to do with chrome is use an ending slash `/` like `devserver/` and it tries that hostname and doesn't search for it.
arcatek 12y ago
It is much slower than Chrome - check http://www.leboncoin.fr http://www.leboncoin.fr and try to move the mouse above the map. The lag is very noticeable.
- mazesc 12y ago
  What about "tech preview" and "not optimized" did you not understand?
  - xutopia 12y ago
    Can you say the same without it coming off as mean-spirited? One example: "They did mention it was a 'tech preview' and that it was 'not optimized'."
    - mazesc 12y ago
      You're right I should have expressed myself differently.
rplnt 12y ago
MRU Tab Switching out of the box. Didn't expect that now that some shitty browsers (Chrome) can't even have it via extensions. I will never understand why someone intentionally removed ctrl+tab functionality from their browser (it's completely useless feature as "select tab to the right"). So I'll keep an eye on this for sure. Even though there are lots of missing features and couple of bugs that I noticed right out of the box. I hope they'll get to the point where they can maintain their own version of Blink, to get rid of some stupid choices they made (text selection for example). Relevant (open-source) project: http://otter-browser.org/ http://otter-browser.org/
- tombh 12y ago
  +1 for MRU Who even finds "select tab to the right" useful??
  - minot 12y ago
    For the people who were confused like I was, MRU stands for most recently used...
  - odiroot 12y ago
    I for example. I like the controls matching the state of the screen. It's more predictable that way. The placement of newly opened tabs / ctrl+opened links is on the other hand something I always find wrong in most browsers. It's seem there's no logic pattern in that.
  - CyberShadow 12y ago
    I couldn't get used to MRU because then I can't get to the tab I want without looking away / breaking my train of thought. Once you know the tab you want is three tabs to the right, you can get to it by muscle memory. You can't build a mental index with MRU because the items keep moving around (but maybe tracking MRU lists is an acquired mental skill). By default, many browsers also arrange tabs in an order I find not entirely optimal. Tree Style Tabs / Tab Mix Plus help here.
    - 12y ago
baby 12y ago
They had one thing to do right for a modern browser: tabs on the side...
- danbee 12y ago
  Check the preferences :)
  - ponyous 12y ago
    Is it there? I'm on phone now. I have been waiting for this desperately! :DD
    - tosh 12y ago
      Yes, it supports vertical tabs (tabs on the side) :)
  - baby 12y ago
    Oh right it's here. A few things: * Why not by default ? * Why is Ctrl+Shift+Tab and Ctrl+Tab working in reverse? Even when I change my preference to "tab order". * It's not customizable enough, I want something that works like Tree Style Tab.
thomasfoster96 12y ago
I'm downloading Vivaldi now. Chrome's safe-download mechanism doesn't like it. As much as I like the idea of writing a browser using web technologies, most attempts so far have been pretty lacklustre. I'll wait until it's finished to pass final judgement on Vivaldi, but I don't really want the old Opera UI and features on top of the browser engine that the current Opera uses. Also, I'm waiting for someone to just make a nice plain web browser. I don't want a mail client built in, I already have one of those. I don't want panels everywhere that I can't hide, nor do I really want a note taker. All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com.
- woah 12y ago
  Chrome?
  - thomasfoster96 12y ago
    What about it?
    - ivanbozic 12y ago
      "All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com." Chrome.
      - thomasfoster96 12y ago
        Chrome's good (I do use it) but it seems to me that Google is turning it into a platform. It has lots of green boxes, but non-standards track features are creeping in.
- wz1000 12y ago
  Well, if you want to take minimalism to the extreme, there is surf[0] [0]- http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
- 12y ago
raquo 12y ago
I hope they make it, sure looks interesting. I kinda miss old-Opera, it was great for its time. I wonder what their business model is. How does one earn money off a browser nowadays? They seem to focus on being a complete browser suite, old-Opera style. Do they plan to sell it as an app? Sell web services (mail etc)? Convert all encountered amazon links into affiliate links? (har har)
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  At a guess, no.1 objective would be to get eyeballs. The money would likely come from the search box/URLs default once they have some scale.
Aoyagi 12y ago
My gods, it looks more like Opera12 than the latest Chropera. I'm so very tempted to start using this as a daily driver right away! And I got an error when trying to register on their forums (edit: solved through IRC), oh well. I wonder if they even considered doing something similar to now-defunct Opera Unite. That thing rocked.
tuananh 12y ago
I wonder how browsers in the past used to work? A single tab takes over 200MB these days.
- findjashua 12y ago
  the most common source of js memory leaks in my experience is devs forgetting to clean up event listeners.
ponyous 12y ago
It's funny because its Mozart's birthday not Vivaldi's.
shadowmint 12y ago
Its not a new javascript engine. Its not a new rendering engine. So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser. It's the same browser with a slightly new UI. Count me as skeptical and unexcited. I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use. (Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)
- 0942v8653 12y ago
  I was likewise hoping that if this new browser used Servo. When I got to the part that said it would be fast, and efficient, and run on old hardware, I thought that Servo would do a good job of that—it has none of the cruft that <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has. But then I saw the part that said the browser's UI was Built on Web Technology, and then I read your comment, and my dreams were crushed forever. Disappointing. Seriously, I can't understand how they expect this to be any faster when everything on the homepage (which is still mostly content-free) says otherwise.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Servo is for research. It's not production-ready and might never be. It's explicitly not intended to replace Gecko.
  - sjwright 12y ago
    <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has cruft? That seems to be a very relativistic statement. In ten years, people will be looking at the next next big thing because it has none of the cruft that <Servo> has.
- detaro 12y ago
  As a user, a different UI is a more compelling reason to switch than a new engine, as long as the "old, boring" engine performs well enough. I miss the Opera UI of the olden days, but Chrome's engine works just fine for me (memory usage is a bit annoying, but tolerable) (Not saying that it isn't important that people work on new, different engines as well in the long run)
n8m 12y ago
My first thought was: "Crap another browser. Fun times." - but I guess it will be alright since everything seems to run on bootstrap & co anyways ...
davidfregoli 12y ago
no ctrl+shift+t?? http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PIMx8pYvMEw/Uek_GUQ-OCI/AAAAAAAAA_0/9xOrP9jGlBU/s1600/fthisshit.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PIMx8pYvMEw/Uek_GUQ-OCI/AAAAAAAAA_...
Polarity 12y ago
- design layout looks cluttered. coloring of the ui to match the website is not a good idea. you cant really distinguish between browser and website, gives me a cluttered feeling. - ui feels slow and flickering after some clicks - double click on yosemite doesnt maximize instead it mimizes the window - dont know why a modern browser needs todos, mail, notes and contacts. we have apps/webapps for that already. - dont fetch stuff from google servers on startup - tab grouping is useless for me, split screen etc. would be more useful imo - integrate a service for bookmarks or deliver an api. local bookmarks are so 1995. - rename it, vivaldi sounds very oldish and boring.
gprasanth 12y ago
I wonder if everyone in the "team" contributed code.
harel 12y ago
I downloaded it without any expectations, and I must say I'm impressed. It even runs our Chrome only single page app very well and fast. I'm looking forward to seeing where this one goes.
cancer12345 12y ago
Cancer
cancer12345 12y ago
cancer
cancer12345 12y ago
KANKER ANUS
renke1 12y ago
All I want is Spatial Navigation like in the old Opera. It was such a intuitive way to operate your browser solely with your keyboard. I really miss the old Opera...
- t0mislav 12y ago
  Same here. Old Opera is now only a nice memory. :/
V-2 12y ago
Still that tiny gap between the tab bar and the edge of the screen :) Years pass, but Opera (and now its offspring) can't get it right.
- waxjar 12y ago
  If i remember correctly, that's so you drag & drop a full window rather than a single tab.
  - lsaferite 12y ago
    I'm looking at chrome with a title bar full of tabs. If I want to move the whole browser I have several places to grab the title bar. Additionally, from a sample size of one I find that selecting tabs happens with a far greater frequency than moving the window. Generally the widow is maximized on one display and I simply Alt-Tab to other windows.
    - V-2 12y ago
      Yeah, exactly. There's normally a bit of free space to the right of tabs. User can grab the title bar there. I'm switching between tabs like 1000 times more often than dragging the entire window anywhere. Perhaps I'm not a typical web browser user, but...
    - waxjar 12y ago
      Or maybe it was window resizing. Either way, I believe that's the rationale behind it.
- callum85 12y ago
  Aside from being draggable, the little gap gives an important visual clue, it spells out the hierarchy between window>tabs. I would guess that user testing backs this up, i.e. people are probably worse at completing tasks like "Move tab X from window A to window B" when the gap is removed.
ludwigvan 12y ago
So good to see the single character keyboard shortcuts from the old Opera, although some functionality is working differently, need to press 1 and 2 twice to switch back and forth? It used to be that 1 and 2 would go to next and prev tab, but now 3 and 4 seem to have been assigned for those. 1 (cycles bt. tabs?), 2, 3 (next tab), 4 (prev tab), z (back), x (forward)
jleight 12y ago
The very first thing I noticed as soon as I opened the browser is that the tabs don't touch the top of the screen when the browser is maximized [1]. This makes closing tabs much more difficult since you can't just move your mouse all the way to the top of the screen and middle click--you have to consciously stop moving the mouse before it leaves the tab. I can understand why they don't touch the top of the screen: the tab stacking shows up above the tab. My suggestion would be to expand the tab to the top of the window, and then just make the tab stacking show up inside at the top of the tab. If not that, at least make the tab's bounding box touch the edge of the screen and leave the tab stacking on top of it. I found a few more issues while typing this up: 1. The browser seemed to think my CTRL key was stuck or something. Typing in my password on imgur made it switch tabs and zoom out multiple times when I went to type some of the numbers in my password. 2. Copying the image URL from the address bar after I uploaded it didn't copy the protocol. The protocol was hidden since it's http, but that adds an extra step of typing "http://" http://" when I wanted to paste it here. The browser looks like it has promise. I like the look-and-feel. I like that the address bar is the progress bar when the page is loading. Being able to add notes and screenshots also seems like it would be incredibly useful. Overall, I'd give the browser another shot once you've made some more progress. [1] http://i.imgur.com/xMOacR5.png http://i.imgur.com/xMOacR5.png
- mdpm 12y ago
  While Fitts' law is useful, that behaviour actually drives me mad as someone who is used to the three mouse buttons having discrete behaviours on the actual caption bar. Suddenly 'tab' is above 'window' in the hierarchy for control.
  - jleight 12y ago
    I can understand that. For me, though, I use middle click to close tabs significantly more often than I move the browser window to another monitor. So I'd rather live with having to click an empty space farther to the right of the tabs when I actually do move the window. I could learn to use CTRL+F4 to close tabs, but I find that slower than just middle clicking the tabs.
- 12y ago
talles 12y ago
I love the Tab Stacks idea. IE tried to do that years ago by coloring tabs, but then you ended with a rainbow in your face instead of really (abstracted away from you) grouping.
binoyxj 12y ago
You all remember RockMelt browser? This = That in the making!
t0mislav 12y ago
UI should be minimal. I dont't understand why all this buttons, dashboard should be visible by default. It looks like kids picture book, distractions everywhere.
- k_ 12y ago
  Well, there's a whole lot of no-UI browsers out there for you. Hell, almost all available browsers fit in this category. But some of us actually miss those UI, so this is good news. Although I'm still disappointed by Vivaldi atm.. not the Opera 9-like I was hoping for =/
jkcl 12y ago
Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots! A picture paints a thousand...
scriptdevil 12y ago
I have been using this browser for the last 4-5 hours. It is fairly good. However, some pages like Dr. Dobbs and Vivaldi's own forum makes all shortcuts fail. The only solution seems to be to alt-tab to some other window and then use the shortcut. That said, the browser is really neat to use.
Touche 12y ago
I really like it! One thing that I'd like is for Bookmarks to be synced with Pinboard. Local browser bookmarks are no use for me (and I would presume a lot of people) because I use too many devices and too many browsers. I don't mind going to pinboard.in to view my bookmarks but it's nice to be able to quickly bookmark something using the native browser UI (rather than an extension).
JoelSutherland 12y ago
If you were looking for screenshots (since this is a wrapper around blink) they are buried here under the Press Resources link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ljm9h48qn2x3v33/AAAmdrTw2ISsKKQNRNHk-73ka/Screenshots?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ljm9h48qn2x3v33/AAAmdrTw2ISsKKQNR...
waxjar 12y ago
> Built on Web Technology I wish this trend would end. The few applications I tried out that advertised being built on web technologies were not very well integrated with the OS (UX wise), huge in binary size, very memory hungry and noticeably slower than native alternatives. It's not a selling point, imo. Especially not when you consider how big a dependency webkit/gecko is and how much bugs and attack surface you're bringing in and are responsible for patching in your end product.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  I'm so glad that I'm not the only one asking for this. I don't understand what the use-case is. Why expend all that energy to make a custom native UI platform when all you end up doing is breaking the standards for my native OS? On Windows, Internet Explorer is the only browser that just gives a simple native window. Chrome and Firefox both cause issues because of their custom drawn windows. I don't see any reason to use Vivaldi if they're going to follow the same path.
rokhayakebe 12y ago
Are they caching websites? I have HN open in both Chrome and Vivaldi and the comments count are different.
fapjacks 12y ago
Uninstalled. "Title: Vivaldi End User License Agreement 7. Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law;"
- nsgi 12y ago
  So your problem is that it isn't open source?
  - lfx 12y ago
    I guess that his problem is with section (c). Since if you will find some security vulns they can sue you, no?
    - foooh 12y ago
      Can they? And even if they could theoretically sue, there's no reason at all to think that they would. This is the former Opera CEO. He's not that kind of guy.
    - nej 12y ago
      A new browser for our friends but don't touch it! lol
- anonbanker 12y ago
  Contacting the FSF as this is using GPL'ed code under a restrictive license.
  - yareally 12y ago
    What library contained in it falls under GPL?
tosh 12y ago
Finally a browser that supports vertical tabs.
benbristow 12y ago
I like how there's already Linux versions out as early as this. Unusual. Seems like a cross between Opera and Chrome. Will have to keep an eye out for this.
Piko 12y ago
511 points on HTML5Test [0] on Linux with Vivaldi. That's more than I get with Chromium (481) or Firefox (449). Vivaldi feels already quite nice but not finished (e.g. flickering of the preview images in vertical tabs when switching the tabs) and generally a tiny bit slower when changing tabs in comparison to chrome/chromium, my default browser at the moment. Definitely keep it installed for now, probably won't use it daily. [0] https://html5test.com/index.html https://html5test.com/index.html
zvrba 12y ago
Can somebody explain to me a viable business case for building yet another browser today? How do they expect to make money on it?
- blister 12y ago
  If they're able to attract market share at all, there's a lot of money to be made in the default search engine arena. The Mozilla Foundation gets quite a bit of money from Yahoo to have Yahoo be the default.
zvrba 12y ago
Can somebody explain to me a viable business case for building yet another browser today? How do they expect to make money on it?
Cowicide 12y ago
I really like the way they've implemented tab previews. I can hover at over the tab and it'll show its thumbnail or I can drag the menubar down under the tab bar and all the tab thumbnails show at once. It makes more sense to me than the way Apple implements it in Safari.
findjashua 12y ago
the #1 thing I want from my browser is tree-style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...)

352 points by vetler 12y ago

Looks good, not sure about the nav changing color to match website styles but that is an interesting approach. Having mail built in is not useful for me, but I wonder if it will support other email providers eventually (gmail etc)?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wanda 12y ago
I don't like it either. I mean it wouldn't bother me that much, it's not a dealbreaker, but it's the kind of minor thing that would prevent me from switching to this browser unless it offers something genuinely advantageous over the existing solutions. But, just fyi, you can switch off the color changing. At least in this preview release.
matmann2001 12y ago
It will likely be a mail client, which will support POP and IMAP compatible mail providers. I'm assuming this on the basis that they features they are looking to implement were part of the old Opera featureset, which included a mail client.
raphman_ 12y ago
M2, the mail client in Opera 12, was one of the main reasons why I stuck to it for a long time. It was quite usable and seems to be the only mail client which properly supports custom IMAP flags (== tags).

albertzeyer 12y ago

I would like some more information. Like what engine is this based on? What JS engine? And I guess the source will not be open? (Why?) Edit: Some more info here: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-browser-former-ceo-opera/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-brows... Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine. I wonder about the differences to Opera then. Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the "Web technology" tab): We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web. So it's like http://breach.cc/ http://breach.cc/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152) then?

quarterto 12y ago
Since it seems to use atom-shell for the UI[1], it's likely Chromium. [1]: https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4 https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4
- Maakuth 12y ago
  User agent provides further evidence, mine reports to be Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36
gorm 12y ago
Most of the UI is based on React. But we use a lot of open source projects. If you run it you should visit vivaldi://credits
- mjg59 12y ago
  It's cool that you use a lot of open source projects. But some of them are under licenses that require the user to be able to download their source code, and it's not obvious right now where (for instance) your Webkit code is. You should probably fix that.
  - mjg59 12y ago
    And as an aside - if you're linking LGPLed material into a static binary (as you appear to be doing with Webkit), you need to follow the provisions of section 6(a) of LGPL 2.1 and provide object files that allow the recipient to re-link the binary with a modified copy of the LGPLed work.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  According to that, it seems that Vivaldi uses a lot of GPL'd and LGPL'd libraries, and it's not clear that Vivaldi is in compliance with the copyleft requirements of those licenses, nor is it apparent which license Vivaldi is released under as well (be it a FOSS license, some EULA, etc.). There are also a lot of libraries listed that are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. Distributing this therefore might not actually be legal, regardless of whether or not it's released under a FOSS license, since those two license families have conflicting requirements for derived works (including works which use those libraries). YMMV, IANAL, etc., but this thing's running the risk of legal technicalities killing it in the crib.

jarcane 12y ago

Color me interested. I'm currently fed up with more or less the entire current crop of browsers, so it would be nice to see a new serious player with some experience enter the field. Old Opera was a fantastic suite in its day, but new Opera is little more than a buggy hack of Chrome.

foooh 12y ago
The new Opera is far more than a buggy hack of Chrome. It has a new user interface which isn't actually buggy.
- jarcane 12y ago
  A new interface which offers less functionality than either Chrome or Opera 12 (it can't even export your bloody bookmarks FFS), constantly locks up and becomes unresponsive for half-minutes or more at a time after simple actions, and largely wastes its breath on visual features like the new bookmarks manager which manage to be deliberately less functional than almost any other possible interface. It's not as bad as Firefox though.

gchokov 12y ago

I am wondering, how did these guys got that domain name. I think such domains should be used for what they are supposed to - Vivaldi, and not some random beta browser (although it might be pretty good!). Too much hype put in the wrong place these days :(

chaotic-good 12y ago

It is possible to search using address bar and separate search bar, why not to join them?

nirvdrum 12y ago
In most (all?) browsers with a unified search bar, your search query may be confused with a URL and breaks your search. There's usually some syntax you can throw at the front to disambiguate, but I'd rather not have to think about whether my query is going to work or not -- especially with new TLDs rolling out all the time. I much appreciate the separate search bar as a result.
- gcb0 12y ago
  but for the browser owners*, every time your url is misinterpreted as a search they win search revenue.
  - matmann2001 12y ago
    I guess not every browser is willing to sacrifice convenience for revenue.
- ponyous 12y ago
  In classic Opera browser if you prefixed your search query with a letter it always searched with engine associated with the letter. For example: `g thisissearch.com` would be interpreted as Google search query, not url. I think this is good behaviour.
  - nieve 12y ago
    There are two different ways to do this in Firefox with no addons or weird configs: Open Preferences->Search->One-click Search Engines, make sure google is checked, double-click "google" in the keyword column, change it to just "g". If you want to keep the old "google" term or outright disable Google as a built-in search engine you can still add "g" as a keyword search. Go to Google, right click the search box, select "Add a Keyword for this Search..." and select "g" as your keyword. This works for search forms on most sites that aren't doing insane stuff with javascript or mandating a security token and it generally remembers other form settings as well.

chaotic-good 12y ago

UI looks really cool though a little bit alien on ubuntu.

pmontra 12y ago
It looks definitely out of place on Ubuntu (a Gnome fallback desktop here.) It looks like something ported from a Windows 8 desktop and it ignores the system setting for the color of the title bar. I also wonder why they are implementing an integrated mail client. It seems a waste of developer time which could be spent on something more important. That said, the browser is pretty fast. Chances that I'll use it: maybe, but not as primary browser. I'm using FF with some vital addons as my primary browser (Firebug, NoScript, AdBlock, SelfDestructingCookies) and Opera/Blink as wordprocessor and spreadsheet on Google Drive, to separate concerns (customer mandated docs). I can't see me leaving FF for this (I didn't for Chrome) but it could end up replacing Opera if they keep it minimal.

anoother 12y ago

Tab stacks! Is this finally a replacement for Opera?

mahouse 12y ago
Yes, the UI is a clone. Memories :_)

owaislone 12y ago

Interesting but no HiDPI support (linux) so won't be able to use as daily driver and help test it.

M4v3R 12y ago
Works fine on retina MacbookPro with High DPI asets, though [0]. [0] http://i.imgur.com/eqVD5kF.png http://i.imgur.com/eqVD5kF.png
Kiro 12y ago
How does HiDPI work on Linux? Is everything scaled to twice the size like with retina?
- hpaavola 12y ago
  Ubuntu has a slider that lets you to adjust the multiplier, see http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=0x2014&image=unity_hidpi_1_show&w=1920 http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=0x2014&image=unity_hidp... Not sure about other distros.
- wooger 12y ago
  Gnome shell has support for HiDPI scaling buried in the Gnome Tweak Tool settings. Sadly, you can mess yourself up if you go exploring in there, see a slider, wonder what it does and give it a go. On a non-HiDPI display anyway!
sibbl 12y ago
works fine on 200dpi Windows as well.

nkuttler 12y ago

Well, I know I'm not your average user, but a website that only displays a spinner to noscript users doesn't exactly make me very confident that this browser will help to make a better www.

phpnode 12y ago
You have chosen to break your own web experience, I'm not sure why you're complaining.
- nkuttler 12y ago
  When I started to use the web there were campaigns like best viewed in any browser, and the browser wars were just starting. I didn't realize that sharing my sentiment would be perceived as complaining. I know how to disable noscript.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    The times had changed. Semantic Web is dead. Nobody anymore gives a damn about that, everyone's drunk the kool-aid of webapps. Everyone used to hate Flash, but it's perceived as normal when the pages are bundled a good chunk of rendering/layout engine to run inside your browser engine. Can't track you and serve you advertisements with plain hypertext documents, duh.
- jiffytick 12y ago
  The issue here is not GP's browsing experience. It's the fact that they failed to address such an elementry UX usecase that should not have occured in the first place; eithrr degrade gracefully or use a noscript tag. This failure is unacceptable if they are the same folks who are working on the web browser, seeing that its UVP is mostly UX. No need to let your biases leak out when noscri.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  If they can't write a web page, why should I trust them to write a browser?

unfamiliar 12y ago

Looks good! I think the first thing you could do with is a public bug tracker/feature request system. I think the forum format is particularly badly suited to managing feature requests and tracking bugs.

eva1984 12y ago

Why there aren't any screenshots? One suggestion: 'A new browser for our friends' is nowhere a good introduction. It simply fails to explain to me the reason why I should care this in the first place.

pikzen 12y ago

Hey cool, a new bowser which seems function- oh for fucks sake it's goddamn node.js again. Stop this shit. I don't need a node runtime taking up 400MB on top of an already memory hungry browser. I don't need a browser using and abusing fucking javascript to run. Looks good though, and features seem interesting.

rtpg 12y ago
You do realise that node.js is basically just V8 right? You kind of need a Javascript runtime for your browser anyways. Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++
- dchest 12y ago
  Also, Chromium has a Blink-in-JavaScript initiative: http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-in-js http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-in-js Blink-in-JavaScript is a mechanism to enable Blink developers to implement DOM features in JavaScript (instead of C++).
- pikzen 12y ago
  >You do realise that node.js is basically just V8 right? Aside from the fact that I don't need a goddamn 400MB runtime running all the time, the major problem is that node.js (and javascript, by extension) are awful tools for anything desktop related. (Server related too, but that's more a personal opinion that node.js is cancer (hi ted)). Performance has never been up to par with C/C++ (no, testing a 100 line script is not a valid bench. No, comparing it against awful code is not a valid bench either. Which kinda invalidates 90% of node benchmarks.). But sure, let's trade a bit of performance for ease of use, I'm all for it. Except when that tradeoff implies using javascript, whose warts are known by anyone sensible. Having a single threaded architecture for a browser, which should basically be running one process/thread per tab is an error we shouldn't be doing anymore in 2015. I sure love one tab crashing my entire browser(hi firefox). Which I managed to do quickly with Vivaldi, but I can understand that it's still a beta. Also, let's ignore the OS's native UI libraries because atom-shell/whatever-desktop-lib-they-use chose to render the entire thing as a DOM because reasons. >Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++ Nowhere did I hold Chrome and Firefox in high regards when it comes to memory usage. Chrome seems to think that allocating 4GB of memory for 20ish tabs is a good idea. Firefox is a bit better but has this slight tendency to leak memory like crazy. tl;dr: browsers suck but that's not a reason to write one in fucking javascript awaiting the nodejs defense force

p0nce 12y ago

Please disable Javascript by default when browsing. It will be very fast.

gear54rus 12y ago

Tab stacks, cloned UI, tab previews, integrated mail. Someone is targeting Opera-like experience and damn, I like it. I am not sure about liking it being another incarnation of Chrome inside though.

matmann2001 12y ago
I think the people behind it are past Opera employees.
- gsnedders 12y ago
  Yup, the majority of Vivaldi people are ex-Opera employees.
- palmer_eldritch 12y ago
  In fact, Vivaldi's founder is Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, one of Opera's founders and ex-CEO of Opera. So I guess one could say there's a link between Opera and Vivaldi (no pun intended).
gosukiwi 12y ago
It just kills it for me that it's basically Chrome with a face-wash...

edwinjm 12y ago

Hmm, so it's not Open Source? So it's not a community effort? So the developers are paid? Then how are these expenses earned back?

vetler 12y ago
My guess is that it's funded by Opera Software co-founder and former Jon von Tetzchner for now, he should have some money left in the bank after leaving Opera.

chj 12y ago

Visit HN on this browser, you will see chrome UI adjusts its color theme automatically. Very impressive.

sonnyp 12y ago

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36 I think it's the first useragent string to contain 7 different browser/engine names.

tzakrajs 12y ago
Poor UserAgent... if only we knew...
Yver 12y ago
Opera has the same horrendous user-agent string, except with "OPR" instead of "Vivaldi".
paulojreis 12y ago
It's roughly the same as Chrome, plus the reference to Vivaldi. It's ugly, as any user-agent string is. The uglier beast, to my knowledge, is this one: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 520) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537 Windows Phone 8.1 Internet Explorer.
- mynameisvlad 12y ago
  That one makes a little more sense. Some user agent detectors will look for Trident and assume it's an old version of IE and therefore not compatible. The more things you put in your UA string, the harder it'll be to fall into the "this is IE" bucket.
  - paulojreis 12y ago
    It serves a purpose, but (IMHO) makes no sense. Microsoft is trying to avoid UA-based blocking (e.g. Google once used this do block the Google Maps web app in Windows Phones) and styling (some sites only send the mobile version to webkit mobile browsers). Microsoft effectively masks its browser by changing the UA string to something which is detected as mobile Webkit, and this is (IMHO) wrong. Even if the site is "functional", a site owner should be able to opt to not support Windows Phones. Suppose you are responsible for a site which carries a heavy and valuable brand. Suppose you don't have/don't want to allocate the resources needed to correctly develop and test your site in Windows Phone. You don't know how the site will run: you won't know about bugs, you can't guarantee a solid user experience and you can't guarantee performance. Ergo, you might affect the brand you carry. Although not ideal, I think it is valid for someone to say "I want to block my site in some device/OS, because I can't guarantee the quality and it might be bad for my brand". I concede (and believe) that the end user should be able to circumvent these mechanisms by, e.g., changing the UA string. However, I don't agree with Microsoft approach of masquerading, by default, as Android and/or iOS browsers. Pardon my rant, but it's just Microsoft being Microsoft: bending standards at will and playing desperate when not it control of a given market.

monk_e_boy 12y ago

Nooooo! Forward/back and home buttons are all in different places to Firefox, IE and Chrome... gah! I wish they'd all use the same layout!

jblok 12y ago

"A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community? That seems like a lot of effort to build a browser for a very small group of users. The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. A lot of times that would be IE - lots of people I know/companies in the UK still use IE out of a lack of knowing any better. Some more savvy users will use Chrome/FF but that's because they realise it has a lot of benefits over IE or are shamed into not using IE. This doesn't really offer any 'wow' features that entice me as a web developer to try it, so your average user is even less likely to try it. And really, when making a browser, your target needs to be the masses because otherwise no web dev is going to support your browser if it requires even the tiniest of special treatment in their code.

werid 12y ago
In an interview with digi.no, they speak of feeling abandoned by Opera when they switched to their new chrome version, and that they weren't alone. Maybe that's their friends. Old Opera 12 users.
Aqwis 12y ago
>The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. Clearly not, as statistics show that IE is no longer the most popular browser in any country in Europe.
- jblok 12y ago
  True, but this comes after many years and a monumental effort by Google, who are backed by huge financial resources.
  - malaporte 12y ago
    Indeed I remember seeing ads for Chrome on the Paris subway, back when it wasn't yet as ubiquitous as it is now.
jarcane 12y ago
"A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community? The "Opera community" is, or was, a thing. Opera spent years cultivating an actual community around their users, with forums and chat and social networking features galore. Then they shut it down last year. The Vivaldi folks have also started Vivaldi.net, which appears to be an attempt to keep that community going elsewhere now that Opera has essentially axed everything that made people love them in favor of being an also-ran Chromium fork.

sehr 12y ago

Opera creators using NPM & React to create a web browser. I love the future

hultner 12y ago

Tried it out, there are some problems with handling local hostnames. Tried visiting my localhost webserver but have to specify http:// http:// every time, even if I'm already on the site and just append something to the url it'll redirect me to google unless I first prepend http:// http://. It's rather annoying considering I only edited the already loaded URL. It's easily a deal breaker from a developer stance point.

semperfaux 12y ago
If it's actively removing the http:// http:// when you type it yourself, yes, I can see that. But then from a developer standpoint it only makes so much sense to develop using a browser with basically zero market share.
- laumars 12y ago
  It's still just Blink under the hood. So the market share point is pretty moot at this point. Maybe as matures it will introduce it's own rendering features and then your point will have more credence.
xrstf 12y ago
Similar things happen in Chrome. This is why I jumped the shark and simply use fake domains with actual TLDs for local development stuff, e.g. "myproject.ninja" or "something.gg". With the advent of all those new TLDs, there should be one for you as well to designate as "this points to localhost". ;-)
- hultner 12y ago
  I've had similar things happen in Chrome but in no way as intrusive and obnoxious, let say in Chrome if I change an existing url in the urlbar of localhost I'm taken to the correct site and not redirected to the google launch page.
- Already__Taken 12y ago
  The only trick I've had to do with chrome is use an ending slash `/` like `devserver/` and it tries that hostname and doesn't search for it.

arcatek 12y ago

It is much slower than Chrome - check http://www.leboncoin.fr http://www.leboncoin.fr and try to move the mouse above the map. The lag is very noticeable.

mazesc 12y ago
What about "tech preview" and "not optimized" did you not understand?
- xutopia 12y ago
  Can you say the same without it coming off as mean-spirited? One example: "They did mention it was a 'tech preview' and that it was 'not optimized'."
  - mazesc 12y ago
    You're right I should have expressed myself differently.

rplnt 12y ago

MRU Tab Switching out of the box. Didn't expect that now that some shitty browsers (Chrome) can't even have it via extensions. I will never understand why someone intentionally removed ctrl+tab functionality from their browser (it's completely useless feature as "select tab to the right"). So I'll keep an eye on this for sure. Even though there are lots of missing features and couple of bugs that I noticed right out of the box. I hope they'll get to the point where they can maintain their own version of Blink, to get rid of some stupid choices they made (text selection for example). Relevant (open-source) project: http://otter-browser.org/ http://otter-browser.org/

tombh 12y ago
+1 for MRU Who even finds "select tab to the right" useful??
- minot 12y ago
  For the people who were confused like I was, MRU stands for most recently used...
- odiroot 12y ago
  I for example. I like the controls matching the state of the screen. It's more predictable that way. The placement of newly opened tabs / ctrl+opened links is on the other hand something I always find wrong in most browsers. It's seem there's no logic pattern in that.
- CyberShadow 12y ago
  I couldn't get used to MRU because then I can't get to the tab I want without looking away / breaking my train of thought. Once you know the tab you want is three tabs to the right, you can get to it by muscle memory. You can't build a mental index with MRU because the items keep moving around (but maybe tracking MRU lists is an acquired mental skill). By default, many browsers also arrange tabs in an order I find not entirely optimal. Tree Style Tabs / Tab Mix Plus help here.
  - 12y ago

baby 12y ago

They had one thing to do right for a modern browser: tabs on the side...

danbee 12y ago
Check the preferences :)
- ponyous 12y ago
  Is it there? I'm on phone now. I have been waiting for this desperately! :DD
  - tosh 12y ago
    Yes, it supports vertical tabs (tabs on the side) :)
- baby 12y ago
  Oh right it's here. A few things: * Why not by default ? * Why is Ctrl+Shift+Tab and Ctrl+Tab working in reverse? Even when I change my preference to "tab order". * It's not customizable enough, I want something that works like Tree Style Tab.

thomasfoster96 12y ago

I'm downloading Vivaldi now. Chrome's safe-download mechanism doesn't like it. As much as I like the idea of writing a browser using web technologies, most attempts so far have been pretty lacklustre. I'll wait until it's finished to pass final judgement on Vivaldi, but I don't really want the old Opera UI and features on top of the browser engine that the current Opera uses. Also, I'm waiting for someone to just make a nice plain web browser. I don't want a mail client built in, I already have one of those. I don't want panels everywhere that I can't hide, nor do I really want a note taker. All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com.

woah 12y ago
Chrome?
- thomasfoster96 12y ago
  What about it?
  - ivanbozic 12y ago
    "All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com." Chrome.
    - thomasfoster96 12y ago
      Chrome's good (I do use it) but it seems to me that Google is turning it into a platform. It has lots of green boxes, but non-standards track features are creeping in.
wz1000 12y ago
Well, if you want to take minimalism to the extreme, there is surf[0] [0]- http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
12y ago

raquo 12y ago

I hope they make it, sure looks interesting. I kinda miss old-Opera, it was great for its time. I wonder what their business model is. How does one earn money off a browser nowadays? They seem to focus on being a complete browser suite, old-Opera style. Do they plan to sell it as an app? Sell web services (mail etc)? Convert all encountered amazon links into affiliate links? (har har)

Gustomaximus 12y ago
At a guess, no.1 objective would be to get eyeballs. The money would likely come from the search box/URLs default once they have some scale.

Aoyagi 12y ago

My gods, it looks more like Opera12 than the latest Chropera. I'm so very tempted to start using this as a daily driver right away! And I got an error when trying to register on their forums (edit: solved through IRC), oh well. I wonder if they even considered doing something similar to now-defunct Opera Unite. That thing rocked.

tuananh 12y ago

I wonder how browsers in the past used to work? A single tab takes over 200MB these days.

findjashua 12y ago
the most common source of js memory leaks in my experience is devs forgetting to clean up event listeners.

ponyous 12y ago

It's funny because its Mozart's birthday not Vivaldi's.

shadowmint 12y ago

Its not a new javascript engine. Its not a new rendering engine. So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser. It's the same browser with a slightly new UI. Count me as skeptical and unexcited. I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use. (Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)

0942v8653 12y ago
I was likewise hoping that if this new browser used Servo. When I got to the part that said it would be fast, and efficient, and run on old hardware, I thought that Servo would do a good job of that—it has none of the cruft that <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has. But then I saw the part that said the browser's UI was Built on Web Technology, and then I read your comment, and my dreams were crushed forever. Disappointing. Seriously, I can't understand how they expect this to be any faster when everything on the homepage (which is still mostly content-free) says otherwise.
- sp332 12y ago
  Servo is for research. It's not production-ready and might never be. It's explicitly not intended to replace Gecko.
- sjwright 12y ago
  <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has cruft? That seems to be a very relativistic statement. In ten years, people will be looking at the next next big thing because it has none of the cruft that <Servo> has.
detaro 12y ago
As a user, a different UI is a more compelling reason to switch than a new engine, as long as the "old, boring" engine performs well enough. I miss the Opera UI of the olden days, but Chrome's engine works just fine for me (memory usage is a bit annoying, but tolerable) (Not saying that it isn't important that people work on new, different engines as well in the long run)

n8m 12y ago

My first thought was: "Crap another browser. Fun times." - but I guess it will be alright since everything seems to run on bootstrap & co anyways ...

davidfregoli 12y ago

no ctrl+shift+t?? http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PIMx8pYvMEw/Uek_GUQ-OCI/AAAAAAAAA_0/9xOrP9jGlBU/s1600/fthisshit.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PIMx8pYvMEw/Uek_GUQ-OCI/AAAAAAAAA_...

Polarity 12y ago

- design layout looks cluttered. coloring of the ui to match the website is not a good idea. you cant really distinguish between browser and website, gives me a cluttered feeling. - ui feels slow and flickering after some clicks - double click on yosemite doesnt maximize instead it mimizes the window - dont know why a modern browser needs todos, mail, notes and contacts. we have apps/webapps for that already. - dont fetch stuff from google servers on startup - tab grouping is useless for me, split screen etc. would be more useful imo - integrate a service for bookmarks or deliver an api. local bookmarks are so 1995. - rename it, vivaldi sounds very oldish and boring.

gprasanth 12y ago

I wonder if everyone in the "team" contributed code.

harel 12y ago

I downloaded it without any expectations, and I must say I'm impressed. It even runs our Chrome only single page app very well and fast. I'm looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

cancer12345 12y ago

Cancer

cancer12345 12y ago

cancer

cancer12345 12y ago

KANKER ANUS

renke1 12y ago

All I want is Spatial Navigation like in the old Opera. It was such a intuitive way to operate your browser solely with your keyboard. I really miss the old Opera...

t0mislav 12y ago
Same here. Old Opera is now only a nice memory. :/

V-2 12y ago

Still that tiny gap between the tab bar and the edge of the screen :) Years pass, but Opera (and now its offspring) can't get it right.

waxjar 12y ago
If i remember correctly, that's so you drag & drop a full window rather than a single tab.
- lsaferite 12y ago
  I'm looking at chrome with a title bar full of tabs. If I want to move the whole browser I have several places to grab the title bar. Additionally, from a sample size of one I find that selecting tabs happens with a far greater frequency than moving the window. Generally the widow is maximized on one display and I simply Alt-Tab to other windows.
  - V-2 12y ago
    Yeah, exactly. There's normally a bit of free space to the right of tabs. User can grab the title bar there. I'm switching between tabs like 1000 times more often than dragging the entire window anywhere. Perhaps I'm not a typical web browser user, but...
  - waxjar 12y ago
    Or maybe it was window resizing. Either way, I believe that's the rationale behind it.
callum85 12y ago
Aside from being draggable, the little gap gives an important visual clue, it spells out the hierarchy between window>tabs. I would guess that user testing backs this up, i.e. people are probably worse at completing tasks like "Move tab X from window A to window B" when the gap is removed.

ludwigvan 12y ago

So good to see the single character keyboard shortcuts from the old Opera, although some functionality is working differently, need to press 1 and 2 twice to switch back and forth? It used to be that 1 and 2 would go to next and prev tab, but now 3 and 4 seem to have been assigned for those. 1 (cycles bt. tabs?), 2, 3 (next tab), 4 (prev tab), z (back), x (forward)

jleight 12y ago

The very first thing I noticed as soon as I opened the browser is that the tabs don't touch the top of the screen when the browser is maximized [1]. This makes closing tabs much more difficult since you can't just move your mouse all the way to the top of the screen and middle click--you have to consciously stop moving the mouse before it leaves the tab. I can understand why they don't touch the top of the screen: the tab stacking shows up above the tab. My suggestion would be to expand the tab to the top of the window, and then just make the tab stacking show up inside at the top of the tab. If not that, at least make the tab's bounding box touch the edge of the screen and leave the tab stacking on top of it. I found a few more issues while typing this up: 1. The browser seemed to think my CTRL key was stuck or something. Typing in my password on imgur made it switch tabs and zoom out multiple times when I went to type some of the numbers in my password. 2. Copying the image URL from the address bar after I uploaded it didn't copy the protocol. The protocol was hidden since it's http, but that adds an extra step of typing "http://" http://" when I wanted to paste it here. The browser looks like it has promise. I like the look-and-feel. I like that the address bar is the progress bar when the page is loading. Being able to add notes and screenshots also seems like it would be incredibly useful. Overall, I'd give the browser another shot once you've made some more progress. [1] http://i.imgur.com/xMOacR5.png http://i.imgur.com/xMOacR5.png

mdpm 12y ago
While Fitts' law is useful, that behaviour actually drives me mad as someone who is used to the three mouse buttons having discrete behaviours on the actual caption bar. Suddenly 'tab' is above 'window' in the hierarchy for control.
- jleight 12y ago
  I can understand that. For me, though, I use middle click to close tabs significantly more often than I move the browser window to another monitor. So I'd rather live with having to click an empty space farther to the right of the tabs when I actually do move the window. I could learn to use CTRL+F4 to close tabs, but I find that slower than just middle clicking the tabs.
12y ago

talles 12y ago

I love the Tab Stacks idea. IE tried to do that years ago by coloring tabs, but then you ended with a rainbow in your face instead of really (abstracted away from you) grouping.

binoyxj 12y ago

You all remember RockMelt browser? This = That in the making!

t0mislav 12y ago

UI should be minimal. I dont't understand why all this buttons, dashboard should be visible by default. It looks like kids picture book, distractions everywhere.

k_ 12y ago
Well, there's a whole lot of no-UI browsers out there for you. Hell, almost all available browsers fit in this category. But some of us actually miss those UI, so this is good news. Although I'm still disappointed by Vivaldi atm.. not the Opera 9-like I was hoping for =/

jkcl 12y ago

Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots! A picture paints a thousand...

scriptdevil 12y ago

I have been using this browser for the last 4-5 hours. It is fairly good. However, some pages like Dr. Dobbs and Vivaldi's own forum makes all shortcuts fail. The only solution seems to be to alt-tab to some other window and then use the shortcut. That said, the browser is really neat to use.

Touche 12y ago

I really like it! One thing that I'd like is for Bookmarks to be synced with Pinboard. Local browser bookmarks are no use for me (and I would presume a lot of people) because I use too many devices and too many browsers. I don't mind going to pinboard.in to view my bookmarks but it's nice to be able to quickly bookmark something using the native browser UI (rather than an extension).

JoelSutherland 12y ago

If you were looking for screenshots (since this is a wrapper around blink) they are buried here under the Press Resources link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ljm9h48qn2x3v33/AAAmdrTw2ISsKKQNRNHk-73ka/Screenshots?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ljm9h48qn2x3v33/AAAmdrTw2ISsKKQNR...

waxjar 12y ago

> Built on Web Technology I wish this trend would end. The few applications I tried out that advertised being built on web technologies were not very well integrated with the OS (UX wise), huge in binary size, very memory hungry and noticeably slower than native alternatives. It's not a selling point, imo. Especially not when you consider how big a dependency webkit/gecko is and how much bugs and attack surface you're bringing in and are responsible for patching in your end product.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
I'm so glad that I'm not the only one asking for this. I don't understand what the use-case is. Why expend all that energy to make a custom native UI platform when all you end up doing is breaking the standards for my native OS? On Windows, Internet Explorer is the only browser that just gives a simple native window. Chrome and Firefox both cause issues because of their custom drawn windows. I don't see any reason to use Vivaldi if they're going to follow the same path.

rokhayakebe 12y ago

Are they caching websites? I have HN open in both Chrome and Vivaldi and the comments count are different.

fapjacks 12y ago

Uninstalled. "Title: Vivaldi End User License Agreement 7. Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law;"

nsgi 12y ago
So your problem is that it isn't open source?
- lfx 12y ago
  I guess that his problem is with section (c). Since if you will find some security vulns they can sue you, no?
  - foooh 12y ago
    Can they? And even if they could theoretically sue, there's no reason at all to think that they would. This is the former Opera CEO. He's not that kind of guy.
  - nej 12y ago
    A new browser for our friends but don't touch it! lol
anonbanker 12y ago
Contacting the FSF as this is using GPL'ed code under a restrictive license.
- yareally 12y ago
  What library contained in it falls under GPL?

tosh 12y ago

Finally a browser that supports vertical tabs.

benbristow 12y ago

I like how there's already Linux versions out as early as this. Unusual. Seems like a cross between Opera and Chrome. Will have to keep an eye out for this.

Piko 12y ago

511 points on HTML5Test [0] on Linux with Vivaldi. That's more than I get with Chromium (481) or Firefox (449). Vivaldi feels already quite nice but not finished (e.g. flickering of the preview images in vertical tabs when switching the tabs) and generally a tiny bit slower when changing tabs in comparison to chrome/chromium, my default browser at the moment. Definitely keep it installed for now, probably won't use it daily. [0] https://html5test.com/index.html https://html5test.com/index.html

zvrba 12y ago

Can somebody explain to me a viable business case for building yet another browser today? How do they expect to make money on it?

blister 12y ago
If they're able to attract market share at all, there's a lot of money to be made in the default search engine arena. The Mozilla Foundation gets quite a bit of money from Yahoo to have Yahoo be the default.

zvrba 12y ago

Can somebody explain to me a viable business case for building yet another browser today? How do they expect to make money on it?

Cowicide 12y ago

I really like the way they've implemented tab previews. I can hover at over the tab and it'll show its thumbnail or I can drag the menubar down under the tab bar and all the tab thumbnails show at once. It makes more sense to me than the way Apple implements it in Safari.

findjashua 12y ago

the #1 thing I want from my browser is tree-style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...)