hckrnws

I'd like to try Vivaldi, but the combination of being (partially) closed-source [1] and free-as-in-beer makes me feel like I must be the product.

Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?

[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...

With Firefox, especially with Firefox on Linux, which always had and still has poor GPU support, I frequently encounter sites that do not work well or they do not work at all. So I must keep a backup browser, which is normally Vivaldi, because typically any site that works in Chrome also works in Vivaldi.

Moreover, Vivaldi has a great advantage over both Firefox and Chrome, in it the command to print a Web page usually works fine, while in both Firefox and Chrome it almost never works correctly.

Both Firefox and Chrome are almost never able to render correctly a "printed" page, even if they render the same page perfectly on screen. In the printed page, the graphic elements have almost always wrong sizes, which results in overlapped or invisible page elements. I suppose that this is caused by the fact that many Web pages stupidly use element sizes in pixels, instead of using length units, e.g. points or inches or mm, and both Firefox and Chrome might scale pixels wrongly when rendering for resolutions that differ from that of the screen, while Vivaldi scales them correctly.

Besides the "Print" command, the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands, as alternatives to keyboard shortcuts, so you do not need to move the hand from the mouse while browsing.

I have been using Vivaldi since it was an alpha build. It is the best browser hands down IMO. I have been here for the entire ride. I am so glad to see that there is not AI bundled in this release, which has been a major concern for me when anticipating future releases of this browser.

I hope they keep it up.

I use Vivaldi because of its Workspaces which have so much better UX than tab groups. I don't need to see my Social or my Tech tab group until I'm switching for it; Firefox shows them all the time - atleast I haven't found a way to hide them and associated tabs until I need them without having to launch a new window. In Vivaldi, they are ready to use immediately upon switching while keeping everything in the same window keeping my taskbar clean. All this while not making my CPU fans run like a jet engine.

I would rather have this experience with Firefox but they are probably more busy focusing on email, vpn and whatever the flavor of the month is.

Closed-source/proprietary and downstream of Chrom* so contributes to browser monoculture. Thanks but no thanks, I'm sticking with Firefox.

Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god intended, with no literally aids and cancer ads out of the box. I switched a while ago from Firefox and while the UI is.. different, it's been a great experience. In my opinion this project and the great people behind it must be the leaders of this industry, and not the current crooked and twisted hegemony we have now.

I'm not affiliated. Happy user.

Vivaldi is all about customization but then they categorically refuse to add extension support to their android browser.

Imo extension is the ultimate way to customize your browser experience.

It's not technical difficulties, there are open source projects that have such support.

I also don't believe it's against any TOS because some of these browser are available in the Google play store.

I just don't get why they refuse to do that.

I used Vivaldi for many years and was a huge advocate. The problem for me was the browser got too bloated and buggy. They kept adding functionality that for me wasn’t necessary. For example: built in Proton VPN support, calendars, email functionality, notes, a game arcade. I don’t want any of that bundled in my browser. I want my browser to be lite weight.

I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.

What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.

Every time I try use Vivaldi I encounter how incredibly slow the UI is. Are all Vivaldi users running it on specced out desktops? Or is it just ao lineux UI latency issue?

I switched to Vivaldi years ago because I got sick of dealing with extensions; an update broke a few of my long relied on extensions and a search for alternatives showed hundreds of options. A few hours into my search for replacements I found a post somewhere by someone in a similar situation, one of the responses was "just install Vivaldi" and I did. In all the years since they have not made one change that has caused me grief or affected my use in the slightest, never have had to learn new features or adjust the way I work, I just get a new icon in the sidebar on occasion which I can ignore until I get curious or get sick of seeing it and remove it.

  >our biggest design overhaul, ever
  >A new look for a new era

Oh god no, just STOP. It's fine the way it is! I dread these headlines from any software project, because it's always worse. Always - and I have to spend time trying restore things back to how it was. Why do software developers do this?

It's a lovely browser, and a lot of work has clearly been put into it. I should like it, because I used Opera for ages (in the Presto era), but it's just a little to busy for me.

There's way to much stuff, to many feature and when the rendering engine is just Blink, I don't really see much of a reason to use it over Firefox.

Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.

Vivaldi is the browser, where I always wonder why it doesn't get mentioned in all the privacy enhanced browsers. It's the only browser for me, that reliably filters out all ads with ublock origin while working on all websites without any problems. Also the company behind Vivaldi is not in USA/China/Russia, which also helps from my point of view.

I loved Opera until they got rid of their in-house browser engine and became a Chromium fork, losing a lot of the functionality and UX I liked about the older versions. Ever since then, I have been very reluctant to use a closed source browser, since I don't want to have to go through another rug-pull of having a company completely change a browser without ability for the community to make a fork.

Vivaldi was only an option until Google removed any real way to run adblocking extensions from Chromium source. If there was a fork of Chromium allowing Ublock Origin to run it could be considered but as it is now there is no real point to consider Vivaldi or any other Chromium based browsers if you want real ad blocking.

Used Vivaldi and it was always slower and more clunkier than Chrome/Chromium but it had its advantages. The team behind it was old Opera team and tried/tries to bring that feel back to the browser with some success. I had been user of old Presto based Opera, the Blink version wasn't really what I looked for and the change of ownership was really questionable.

Used Vivaldi for years but it kept breaking my workflows and would wipe out my meticulously assembled tab groups. After few such gaffes I switched to Brave. I really wanted Vivaldi to work but can’t let it break workflows.

Pure love from me to Vivaldi.

The only browser that allows me to tile 3,4,5... pages in the same view. Or to group pages into "stacks" or many other small but useful perks.

Respect the tremendous amount of work that went into this!

I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?

Also, for years I’ve been uncomfortable using Chromium as I’m uncomfortable raising that statistic any more, since I don’t want the Internet to be designed for one particular engine. Maybe Vivaldi 9.0 will be the biggest design overhaul of all time and even refactor based on Gecko like Firefox :)

> Get away from Big Tech

> You deserve better

Probably better to avoid (Chromium-based) Vivaldi then.

Vivaldi is the only browser where you can actually disable Ctrl+W from closing a tab. And that is why fat fingered I uses it.

Wait so you make a big announcement talking about a full new redesign but dont actually show a demo? That should be illegal

Why should I use it instead of, for example, Brave?

Looks better than expected.

I just wish the address bar were expanding fully to the right when selected, with the "Show Full Address" setting on and right-side vertical tabs. Otherwise, one has to jump around the visible part of the address bar in order to find the right part.

Edit: details.

Been using Opera since the early 00s and followed the dev team to the new company Vivaldi. Using any other browser always feels like a massive downgrade to me. I'm grateful for this software. Made by people with a vision that doesn't suck completely.

There are some very annoying bugs or quirks unfixed since years. I tried very hard to like Vivaldi, but it is impossible to use it as a web developer. "If DevTools in focus not possible to switch to another browser tab with CTRL+TAB" or "Text input loosing focus after switching tabs" are some examples.

Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.

I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.

> Vivaldi 8.0: our biggest design overhaul, ever

> If you have been using Vivaldi for years, you have your setup exactly as you want it and you would not trade it for anything.

The thing so many software makers seem to not understand is that if I have been using something for years and have my setup exactly as I want it, then I do not want any overhauls.

I wonder if they have a way to sync profiles, extensions, history, etc across devices + mobile without needing to create an account. Similar to what brave does. Oh well

> This is Vivaldi. It always has been.

Wonder if the site dev was thinking of the astronaut pointing a gun at another astronaut meme when they put this in.

still as bloated as ever?

can't we just have tabs + tiling (either tiles in tabs, or tabs in tiles, both can work), and call it a day?

that's all I need from browsing today

No, thanks. Vivaldi is proprietary software and therefore not trustworthy. Since the source code isn't fully available, there's no way to verify whether an update might secretly add a feature that collects data. Since the source code isn't fully available and you can't compile it yourself, there's no way to prevent a feature that collects data from being secretly added during an update. The reasoning behind why it isn't open source is also complete nonsense. Just because it's easy to create a fork doesn't change the fact that most users will stick with the original as long as the fork doesn't offer significant improvements. With Firefox, people aren't flocking to the existing forks either.

Another happy user here - it's the power users chromium fork. Criminally underrated. It's a small Norwegian team with no VC funding and a sustainable business model.

I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.

This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.

> If you have been using Vivaldi for years, you have your setup exactly as you want it and you would not trade it for anything.

You wouldn't be able to even if you wanted because there is no good way to export/import your changes for the trade to happen

Otherwise removing a few borders seems a bit underwhelming for a major version bump

I always liked Vivaldi's simple+autohide layout. Unfortunately, the 3-4 times I tried to use it over the years I always ended up giving up due to random performance regressions over stock Chromium. It's been a few versions now though, maybe it's worth a go again.

How does it compare with firefox? Can you add ublock and noscript?

Ah nevermind I see a chromium fork, I skip

I want to like another browser than Firefox but none of the other browsers present any interesting features and all come with web destroying downsides.

I would like to use Vivaldi but from my understanding they harvest just as much user data as Chrome. I'll stick to Brave for now.

Looks way better and almost everything is quite cohesive but then they add the weird arrow with an uggly box around it in the top right.

beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you will lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s...

the largest plorblem preventing me choose vivaldi as all platforms browser, is that its mobile version , still don't support add browser extension, and they seem won't add this feature in future.

I mainly use Vivaldi because it has the best vertical tabs experience among the browsers.

Well, fuck.

One of the main reasons I switched to Vivaldi a few years ago was that it allowed and even advertised a "classic" browser experience. By which I mean: tabs that behaved like tabs, visual separation, not a lot of useless whitespace and corner-radius-maxxed borders everywhere.

Looks like that's all gone now and Vivaldi is just yet another generic "flat design" browser. Time to look for something else...

Vivaldi is somehow the only Chromium-based browser whose extensions survive a macOS migration, presumably because they don't do the same extension encryption that other Chromium browsers do.

It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.

It is always good to have more than one browser.

Is mouse support in Vivaldi still broken?

Two questions, how can you trust closed source? And how are they already on release 8.0; what are these significant improvement each time or is it like apple's yearly release?

LLM generated slop.

> This isn’t about making the browser look simpler. It’s about making the structure behind it more coherent. This makes everything you see feel like part of the same system.

then the unicode decorations

A decent solution with vertical tabs!

I was an Opera user for years. Now I'm a Vivaldi user also since a long time. Best browser, FF/Chrome doesn't come close.

It is a great browser, thank you. Would you consider to add an option that signals scam websites and especially the ones that do not give the option of denying cookies or making it helly difficult being so in non compliance with gdpr. That is some data that you will be glad to sell, we get a better service and Eu warriors make some money on it.

Another Chrome skin

For me on Windows. It hangs a lot. Thus I uninstalled.

The killer feature of vivaldi is mouse gestures on every page. The killer feature of brave is the adblocker. I wonder if I can use some AI to maintain a frankenbrowser.