Former Opera CEO Launches Vivaldi, A New Browser For Power Users

[bill]

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/vivaldi-the-four-browsers/ [techcrunch.com]

Former Opera CEO Launches Vivaldi, A New Browser For Power Users

Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner is launching the first preview of Vivaldi today [vivaldi.com], a new Chromium-based browser that is squarely aimed at power users. Vivaldi features tools like Quick Commands for using written commands instead of the mouse, an Opera-like Speed Dial for quickly accessing bookmarks, a note-taking feature and the ability to organize tabs into stacks.

[Brett_Tabke]

Looks AWESOME. Installing now.

[Andem]

I was going to use that exact word "AWESOME"! I'm very excited.

[weeks]

Looking forward to the reviews you give it.

[Brett_Tabke]

This thing is flushed out pretty close to Opera O27. It's awesome first release.

[lucy24]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36

Well, it was the first question that came to my mind.

For comparison purposes:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.93 Safari/537.36

and (this probably isn't the latest version)

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36 OPR/26.0.1656.60

On my system it seems to have used Safari's history for auto-completing the URL.

[bill]

It's missing a bunch of Opera 12.x functionality still. I miss the right-click to add a Note. My mouse navigation buttons don't seem to work, but at least mouse gestures are working!

[lucy24]

Predictably I looked for the file-encoding menu-- to say nothing of font-and-size preferences-- but couldn't find it. Possibly it's in the long list of Stuff We're Going To Add Later, Honest, We Didn't Overlook It.

[Robert Charlton]

^ ^ ^ ^
Lucy... from the TechCrunch article...

...while this is clearly still an early preview and many features are still missing....

I'm desperate for the email client they describe, which apparently will take a while to arrive...

In the long run, Vivaldi will also include a built-in mail client....
"I don't think webmail is for everyone," he told me. "It's definitely not for the advanced user. We find that lots of users have multiple mail accounts and they don’t tie together and when you have the mail client built into the browser, it feels more natural." Vivaldi will soon offer its users a Vilvaldi.net email address, but the mail client will work with any email account.

Notes and Tab Stacks also have me breathing heavily. I'm looking forward to the reviews here too.

[JAB Creations]

Is the GUI customizable or is it just another Chrome copy-paste clone with extra keyboard shortcuts?

John

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, it is an awesome good start. I think it has more features and is more flushed out than the 3 year old Opera 27.
Looks to me like they are going to head down the Opera 12.5 feature path.

[engine]

I've been testing this since the news yesterday and, I agree, it's a pretty good first pass. I'll keep running this in parallel with other browsers, but I have to say, I like the usability. Lots of tools readily available without digging.

[JAB Creations]

Finally had a couple minutes to look and well it's far from a replacement for Opera 12.1/12.5 though it is at least slightly more than a Chrome copy-paste. There is no GUI customization other then moving the tab bar to the extreme top/right/bottom/left however the tab remains above the (default few no-text-label Chrome) GUI buttons so the browser infers that the website has control over you, not you having control over the website. The tab cycling is totally broken because pressing CTRL+TAB does not cycle left-to-right in absolute if you've created tabs and do things in a certain fashion, they'd have to add a normal option.

The Opera panel / sidebar is there by default. There is no context menu (right-click) to customize the GUI. If they want to make Vivaldi they're really going to have to get in to the nitty-gritty about these sort of details to compete with Firefox for claiming to be customizable (and it's not like Firefox is easy to customize these days any more any way). For a preview release it'll make original Opera users with plus five horse power a bit happy but it is in no way shape form or fashion even close to being ready for true power users, hopefully that will change with time.

- John

[Brett_Tabke]

I've been using it alot the last few days. For a Alpha version, it is pretty feature rich. Jab - if you look in the vivaldi\Application\1.0.83.38\resources\vivaldi\resources you see the entire GUI is gfx based. Obviously, a theme editor is in the works.

[mcneely]

I like it -- No frills, no chills. Plain and simple.

Not finding where to configure 'clear cache/history/cookies' at the end of the session when the browser is closed though.

Aside from a few bookmarks, I'm not big on loading my browsers full of junk -- Every session should start out clean IMO so when I close the browser, everything goes away.

Give me a heads-up if I missed the toggle somewhere - If in fact we can indeed clear cookies/history with this browser at all.

Thanks

(Note to self: They can put on a 32bit Windows build, but they can't put on a 32bit Linux build)

So much for spreading the good news to all of the folks that are running 32bit Linux --

[Brett_Tabke]

New weekly build is out and it is quite a bit faster. One thing I have noticed, is that it took alot of daily usage to find all the hidden stuff like a site specific settings menu (click fav icon for site in address bar). There is a bunch about cookies in settings as well.

[mcneely]

The best I can find is the allow 'session' cookies ... Still not able to configure it to dump cache at the end of a session tho' ...

[tangor]

While a very nice start, it is not quite ready for prime time. I'll wait for a few more updates before making any decision.

[bill]

Snapshot 1.0.98.2 is out [vivaldi.net...]
Anyone found a good place to monitor when these are released?

[Brett_Tabke]

They say auto update or auto notification is in the works. I'd guess the code is related to the 'sync' feature being worked on.
For now - just watch the blog. Is there an rss for the blog?

[vivaldi.net...]

[bill]

There's an RSS feed link on that page, but along with the useful Vivaldi Team posts you get a whole bunch of junk in Russian, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc. It's not a focused feed. Looks like everything in the new Vivaldi community.

[Brett_Tabke]

[vivaldi.net...]

[Hoople]

So much for spreading the good news to all of the folks that are running 32bit Linux --

+1 to that. My primary box isn't being upgraded soon, so my review of this will be delayed....

[Brett_Tabke]

[vivaldi.net...]

Builds:
Windows: Download
Mac: Download
Linux DEB: Download 32bit | Download 64bit
Linux RPM: Download 32bit | Download 64bit

[mcneely]

Linux DEB: Download 32bit | Download 64bit
Linux RPM: Download 32bit | Download 64bit

Wow .. these guys are moving right along with this - Sure didn't take long for them to 'Get Right On That' in the 32bit build did it?

We now offer 32 bit Linux version as many people asked for it!

By the turn-around time on this, I think there are more people out there w/32bit Linux than the industry might be willing to admit ..

Thanks for the info @Brett

[mcneely]

I'm sort of wishing that it would read/render my elements better/quicker tho' -- CSS3/jQuery