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Topic: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser (Read 27045 times)

Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

A thread on developments with the Vivaldi browsers from Vivaldi Technologies. This continues the Vivaldi Technical Preview Released thread.Vivaldi Technical Preview Released 




Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #2
In Firefox and Otter I can opt to work offline, but Vivaldi and "Opera" don't seem to have such an option unless I'm overlooking it?


Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #4
I don't think that's quite Vivaldi's philosophy. :P

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #5
Vivaldi's tab cycler finally caught up with old Opera's

List layout for visual tab cycler

Edit: Posted in Otter. Otter apparently identifies as Chrome now by default.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #6
Nice. I wonder if I should try to use it at work instead of Chrome. (Chrome isn't my choice, obviously. But supposedly it works best. If indeed true it should naturally apply to any Chromium.)

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #7
Are you not allowed to install your own browser at work? I always install like five of them at any workstation.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #8
It's about the CMS (on the backend side). Actually Chrome is also a user-based install. On reflection I'm mildly surprised something like Chrome or Firefox isn't part of the standard deployment, given that Windows 7 comes with some ancient version of IE.

Anyway, it's not something that got in my way that needed to be resolved like Windows' lack of a compose key. I find WinCompose essential to half-sane typing. Unfortunately Windows' US International layout is significantly worse than the one in Linux and you would need administrator privileges to make your own…

Windows' inability to scroll directly in windows that aren't active is also pretty terrible.[1] Annoyingly, it works in Windows 10 with the touchpad… but setting aside that discrepancy, at work we have the (mostly superior) WIndows 7.

There are also some things I'm more tentative about, like Pulover’s Macro Creator and Ditto (clipboard manager).

AltDrag is something I would use, but it doesn't work quite right. It messes up the scrolling. (We've got those Logitech mice with nice scrollwheels. Actually it's the first scrollwheel I've ever used that doesn't, essentially, suck.)

Just about the only thing Windows has on Linux by default (or at least on Xfce) are the Windows key + arrow shortcuts: https://fransdejonge.com/2018/04/mimic-windows-snap-hotkeys-in-xfce/

Windows 10 does have nice touchpad support, although possibly not quite as nice as Apple: https://fransdejonge.com/2018/05/mimic-windows-touchpad-gestures-in-xfce-with-libinput-gestures/

Anyway, while a couple of browser tabs are integral to my current job, the only annoyance I really have with Chrome is its Ctrl+Tab behavior, but there's an extension for that. I haven't felt a pressing need to experiment with other Chromia like Opera or Vivaldi.

(I mean, Chrome's bookmarks are even worse than IE/Edge, etc. etc. but I don't really need much more than about a dozen bookmarks.)

Really the biggest reason I'm considering Opera or Vivaldi is because you can properly press escape in the addressbar. Chrome has this annoying behavior where you can't get focus back on the page without a mouse click as far as I can tell.
Please let me know if you can automatically raise windows by scrolling in them somehow… X-Mouse Button Control doesn't seem to be capable of it.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #9
...to be resolved like Windows' lack of a compose key.
Yes. Ever since I discovered that CapsLk can be configured away, I can barely type on a workstation where it's not been configured away.

Anyway, while a couple of browser tabs are integral to my current job, the only annoyance I really have with Chrome is its Ctrl+Tab behavior, but there's an extension for that. I haven't felt a pressing need to experiment with other Chromia like Opera or Vivaldi.
As a minimum, I always replace Chrome with Chromium, so I know specific annoyances of Chromium better than those of Chrome.

For me, tiles are important. In a not-so-good-but-rather-common scenario, I resort to different browser windows (of different browsers) side by side. In a better case there is some good tiling inbuilt in the browser. TileTabs extension for Palemoon and Firefox is a good start, but only a start. Currently, Vivaldi and Otter are uniquely powerful in doing tiles, and I particularly like that they are doing it differently: Otter in a floating/stacking way like old Opera, Vivaldi as a wholesale mosaic.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #10
Chrome comes with a bundled PDF plugin, bundled Flash, and a couple of extra codecs. The differences are minute to non-existent.j

The kind of tiling I (sometimes) use is browser Win key+left, Word Win key+right. But we have two screens for a reason, so I only sometimes do that to minimize mouse back & forth traffic.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #11
The kind of tiling I (sometimes) use is browser Win key+left, Word Win key+right.
I need this kind of tiling so often that it led me to tiling window managers: open two windows and they arrange themselves automatically like that.

But the kind of tiling I was talking about is as follows.

1. Open two tabs in Otter.
2. Right-click on tabbar > Arrange > Tile

Tell me you don't like it. You can even full-screen it and the tiles are preserved.[1]

Same works in Vivaldi, but there you can tile a random selection from a multitude by Ctrl+click. The resulting tiles have borders like in Tmux.
I'd prefer it to have two-fold behaviour. A. When focus is on the frame/window, preserve the tiles on full-screen. B. When focus is inside a tab, full-screen the tab. But that as an aside. As it is now, it is Opera-ish enough.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #12
Tell me you don't like it.
Of course I like it. I have no idea why only Opera and MyIE2 ever offered the option. But I don't need it. Dragging a tab off in its own window on the second monitor is typically more efficient if that's what you need to do. (Of course that only applies if you've got two monitors.)
Same works in Vivaldi, but there you can tile a random selection from a multitude by Ctrl+click.
Which is how Windows 95 through XP did it using the taskbar. Vista killed it. 7 added Win+arrows but it should've been another way to trigger the same effect.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #13
Of course I like it. I have no idea why only Opera and MyIE2 ever offered the option. But I don't need it.
Well, I need it. And rather often.

Dragging a tab off in its own window on the second monitor is typically more efficient if that's what you need to do.
Depends on what it is you "typically" need to do. I often have a scenario with two websites side by side and a few more windows, such as text editor or processor (or both), pdf viewer, file manager, ..., and when, due to lack of space, I need to open up one of those other windows on top of the two websites, and the two websites are in separate windows, then the only efficient way to get back to the two websites is to minimise what I opened up on top of them. But if I have the two websites tiled in a single browser window, then I have two efficient (one-click) ways to get back to them: Either minimise the other window I just opened up on top of the websites or switch to the browser.

I consider several shortcuts to get somewhere more efficient than a single way. 
Same works in Vivaldi, but there you can tile a random selection from a multitude by Ctrl+click.
Which is how Windows 95 through XP did it using the taskbar. Vista killed it. 7 added Win+arrows but it should've been another way to trigger the same effect.
Yes, a great loss. I have not even found a statusbar or windows-list widget in Linux that would do the same thing: Ctrl+click a random selection of opened windows and then apply some group actions on the selected windows.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #14
Yes, a great loss. I have not even found a statusbar or windows-list widget in Linux that would do the same thing: Ctrl+click a random selection of opened windows and then apply some group actions on the selected windows.
Not even in KDE or Cinnamon? Huh, that's weird. It's just such a self-evident mechanism.[1] No one ever taught me it was there. I don't think it was in the Windows 98 manual, although that was just a little 40 to 50 page booklet as opposed to the few hundred page manuals that came with Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Works 3.[2] It might've been in the Windows 98 help files.

Speaking of help files… Microsoft no longer bundles the (tiny!) program that can read old help files. When I upgraded from XP to Debian I really wasn't kidding when I said it broke roughly the same amount of my workflow. What surprised me is how much better I like Linux. Partially for some of the more obvious (e.g., more developer/tinkering friendly), but mainly because I need to do so much less clicking and button pressing to get things done.
KDE has always seemed like it should appeal to me… but somehow it doesn't.
Those did teach me some things.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #15
Yes, a great loss. I have not even found a statusbar or windows-list widget in Linux that would do the same thing: Ctrl+click a random selection of opened windows and then apply some group actions on the selected windows.
Not even in KDE or Cinnamon? Huh, that's weird. It's just such a self-evident mechanism.[1] No one ever taught me it was there.
I have not taken a look at KDE for a few years now, but I'm sure that I'd find plenty of goodies there. Perhaps even ctrl+click selection somewhere.

Ctrl+click selection is nowhere inbuilt in Cinnamon, except in Nemo file manager (as it is in file managers in general). No Alt+click either. Midclick can be configured somewhat, but not that much.

It's not in Xfce taskbar either, is it? Perhaps it indicates that it's not so universally self-evident after all.

I like desktop environment taskbars and I wish they'd do more, particularly via right-click menus. Cinnamon has "Close other windows" and "Close all windows" under right-click on a window button on the taskbar. Those are useful options and should rather self-evidently be available in every desktop environment, in my opinion. More auto-layouting the windows would also be very useful. MS Windows (even v.10) has "Cascade" and "Tile" and more under right-click on the taskbar, so why not everyone else?

Overall, I have found that tiling window managers are immensely useful for layouting, but less useful for random multi-selection operations on windows. I also like how i3wm creates and deletes workspaces (virtual desktops) automatically as you use them and leave them. However, it would be even more useful if I could delete a given workspace + close all windows there when it's not in focus. Stacking window managers tend to do better with multi-selection operations, but I don't know of a window manager that has given a thorough thought on multi-selection operations with windows or workspaces that are not in focus.

It would be great if Rofi did more window operations, in addition to switching between them :)
KDE has always seemed like it should appeal to me… but somehow it doesn't.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #16
It's not in Xfce taskbar either, is it? Perhaps it indicates that it's not so universally self-evident after all.
It's self-evident because that's how you're taught to select things with Ctrl+click/drag/arrows and Shift+click/drag/arrows.

Present-day Microsoft would probably remove it from Windows Explorer because you're taught that isn't a thing you can do everywhere else, as opposed to doing the logical thing and extending Ctrl+click selection anywhere it makes sense to…

It's probably a bit like how intuitively modifier keys worked on things like links in old Opera. People used to non-Opera browsers had been taught modifier keys never worked the way you'd logically expect them to.

Old Microsoft and maybe Apple understood how to make a reasonably consistent GUI that worked as expected. Old Gnome and still current Xfce, as well as possibly current Mac are mostly the next best thing, superior in a few minor mostly mouse/touchpad-interaction related ways.

I suppose you could argue that Windows 10 is making the GUI more consistent again, go them, but since it's not in an empowering way (i.e., you can do less and less) that's otherwise irrelevant.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #17
It's self-evident because that's how you're taught...
Taught by whom? By reading manuals, help files, and documentation?

I have not seen anybody who is teaching computers to others. It's a totally dark area. My own skills are completely self-taught and when work stress drowns me, I can't learn anything new, I forget much of what I have learned, and I am incapable of teaching others the little that I have retained.

Occasionally I meet new colleagues who don't even know there is such a thing as right-click menu and you can select stuff there to do stuff. Sadly, instruction in the computer section is severely lacking.

Edit: Developers of corporate software products like MS Windows cannot apply their ideas consistently and take them to their conclusion. They can do only what they are told to do. At the same time, developers free from corporate constraints don't have the resources to make a polished final product. Still, I vastly prefer what has been achieved in the GNU/Linux realm.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #18
Taught by whom? By reading manuals, help files, and documentation?

[…]

Occasionally I meet new colleagues who don't even know there is such a thing as right-click menu and you can select stuff there to do stuff. Sadly, instruction in the computer section is severely lacking.
I would imagine it is in fact taught in basic Word and especially Excel, if not in some kind of earlier basic computer skills instruction in managing files and the like. But I meant taught by regular daily use of your computer. You're taught to expect to be able to do this kind of selection, so it's very jarring when you can't do it in places that would be well-suited to it. Except in the mid-'90s there was no such thing as a jarring experience. It mostly much just worked as you would expect it to. Okay, admittedly it was a little bit jarring because Shift+click did not in fact work as expected. But instead of rectifying that issue, Microsoft just stripped it out. Or probably didn't even realize that the taskbar had been made to do that by more competent past Microsoft.

It doesn't help that Nadella is into all the cloud stuff. Have you ever used Office 365 online? On the one hand it's freaking amazing that you can quickly open a Word document or something perfectly without having to install Office, on the other hand it's horribly slow and trying to work on an Excel document with a few people at once (the main supposed attraction there) is a complete and utter disaster.

I strongly suspect real Excel on a 286 is faster and more featureful than Excel online on a top of the line Intel Core i7 model.

PS I kind of hate Excel. It has some truly bizarre design decisions, like an undo function spread across multiple open documents that I can only hope made sense back in 1980. I pretty much just prefer LO Writer and Calc, except Calc gets a bit more bogged down with humongous spreadsheets, so there's that… I think Gnumeric is probably the superior spreadsheet program. Not that I'd risk being blamed with messing up some important spreadsheet by using something other than Excel.

I've never used Apple Numbers. It wouldn't surprise me if it were pretty decent. Pyspread is cool; using Python expressions is much nicer than using whatever you call the things you type in Excel. Calligra Sheets is cool too, and if I were, ahem, crazy I'd probably just use the spreadsheet module from Microsoft Works 2 or 3, or maybe Excel 97 or 2000 (not XP).

PPS Sometimes you read the weirdest things. Like someone talking negatively about Writer's styles compared to Word's, which I actually consider Writer's biggest advantage over Word. It's in stuff like track changes that Writer is no more than adequate and really only for the past few years.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #19
It doesn't help that Nadella is into all the cloud stuff. Have you ever used Office 365 online? On the one hand it's freaking amazing that you can quickly open a Word document or something perfectly without having to install Office, on the other hand it's horribly slow and trying to work on an Excel document with a few people at once (the main supposed attraction there) is a complete and utter disaster.

I strongly suspect real Excel on a 286 is faster and more featureful than Excel online on a top of the line Intel Core i7 model.
Yes, I have tried Office 365 Online and Google Docs too. Not bad for viewing, but definitely bad for editing, and even worse when multiple users are at it at the same time. Cloud is no good for handling multiple dynamic access. Servers are for that.

That aside, my earlier main tool (website) at work used to be Excel-based. It worked brilliantly, because whatever didn't work I was able to configure and change. Now we have a supposedly more advanced thing that has been built on all the wrong principles:
- It's a thing embedded in another thing so that I don't see the real source code and I cannot change it
- Presumably due to the first point, a bunch of glitchy "features" follow, such as that the browser cannot preserve form history in the forms, there's no right-click, there's no feedback on page loading, etc. Total crap.
- The overall design adds more steps to the workflow, massively multiplying the time to get things done...

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #20
Also features like we were just talking about, such as Shift+click, tend to be forgotten in browser-based interfaces for some reason. Luckily we can hack that together ourselves, although only to the extent of spending a few minutes finding solutions written by someone else.[1] I run a userscript in TamperMonkey so that I can Shift+click checkboxes, and I have a bookmarklet to add sorting to tables when necessary.[2] Combined they make up for something that IT apparently considers low priority,[3] but we're talking about highly educated not horribly paid people wasting many hours together.

I suspect that in the open-source world there's much more "eating your own medicine" and also just people switching a lot more between roles even if they mainly stick to one or two roles.
I'd write my own userscript, but it'd take an hour or maybe two… imo it'd still be defensible given that I'd save me at least that much time over the next month or two but I'd have to do it on my own time.
One backend has all that stuff built-in; the other for some reason doesn't. It seems to me like you could pretty much just c/p it since we're just talking about sorting and filtering the HTML without any backend involvement (as proved by the efficiency of my userscript and bookmarklet), but oh well. :P
I guess end-user facing bugs are almost always considered more important.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #21
When did Vivaldi add Chrome(ium) extension support? Since it supposedly has synchronization these days as well (though I can't seem to find it) I just might switch.

Edit: oh:

Note: Sync is currently only available in the Snapshot version of Vivaldi. Find out more about the difference between Snapshot and Stable on the Vivaldi Blog.

Edit 2: so tiling in Vivaldi is weird. It works with Ctrl, but not with Shift. Which would be okay-ish... I meant, it's no worse than Windows 9x-XP, except that you can in fact select things with Shift to e.g. close many tabs at once. I think this worked correctly in Opera/Presto.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #22
When did Vivaldi add Chrome(ium) extension support? Since it supposedly has synchronization these days as well (though I can't seem to find it) I just might switch.
How do you even remember the time when extensions were not there? Obviously they wanted to implement extensions asap, otherwise  the extensions crowd (i.e. the overwhelming majority) would not use it.


Edit: Vivaldi's Toggle UI setting in the Keyboard section is also cool. Assign a keybind to it and bang, you got a barebones frame with the webpage.

I wanted to achieve (among other things) something like that in Otter when I was whining about True detach and minimalInterface got implemented. The problem with Otter's minimalInterface is that it is a parameter to other actions, not an action in itself, so I have no idea what to prefix it with so that it would work in-place in the current window, without doing anything else.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #23
I seem to be misremembering. In Opera/Presto you can Ctrl and Shift select, minimize a bunch of things and then tile those that are open. But disappointingly it doesn't look like you can tile a selection. Of course it's also possible that the ability to do so was simply lost with Opera 10.50.

How do you even remember the time when extensions were not there? Obviously they wanted to implement extensions asap, otherwise  the extensions crowd (i.e. the overwhelming majority) would not use it.
Well, what I meant was really an equivalent of UserJS/Grease/TamperMonkey. Opera/Presto does it without extensions. But being able to install TamperMonkey does the trick as well.

Anyway, since Vivaldi didn't do anything about Ctrl+scroll zooming the GUI at some point I just uninstalled it. Actually for all I know that's still a problem; I didn't even try it yesterday.

Re: Keeping an eye on the Vivaldi Browser

Reply #24
@ersi Vivaldi seems to be fairly nice. Editing bookmarks is unintuitive, but my main problem is I can't seem to figure out how to use bookmarklets? A browser that doesn't do bookmarklets is pretty useless…[1]

On the plus side, it taught me something about Chrome: Ctrl+Shift+Del is not exclusive to Vivaldi, but Vivaldi makes it easily discoverable through the menus.

The main advantage is actually that it seems to be slightly faster than Chrome. I'm not sure how that's possible but I also recall post-2014 Opera saying something about being faster than Chrome…

A big thing Vivaldi does better than Chrome is that you can actually press Escape to lose focus the addressbar. Freaking annoying in Chrome and Firefox when you get down to it.
I can always paste stuff in the web console or something, but Vivaldi's theoretical giant advantage here over Chrome and Opera/Blink is the nicknames.