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Topic: "Should I stay or should I go?" (Read 22772 times)

"Should I stay or should I go?"

OK, now I have very mixed feelings about this:
https://vivaldi.com/#Home
It had to be expected, but at least someone from their team could try to contact me earlier, and warn about these plans (as they were aware of this project for a year).
Nadszedł już czas, najwyższy czas, nienawiść zniszczyć w sobie.
The time has come, the high time, to destroy hatred in oneself.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #1 –
According to the wise words of Bush II: "Stay the course!"

I have not found a way to install that thing yet. What does the interface look like? Can you post some screenshots? What's the list of features?

And they kept it very secret. I have been reading the Russian threads at Vivaldi all along. Everybody reasonably guessed it was to be a browser, but there was never any official information. The official policy of Opera ASA both under Tetzchner and later - and now at Vivaldi - was always "No comment until it's ready."

And, you know, modular free open-source implementation always beats closed-source corporative management. If they made a broken half-baked feature somewhere, the bug reports will either be overlooked or merged into the code so that the codebase will end up progressively worse. Nobody will be interested in keeping the codebase and the feature set streamlined as a whole. I hope you will do it.

Keep it up and perhaps cooperate with the developer of Fifth. (Yeah, I acknowledge that I am speaking as someone with no coding and no project management abilities. Just as someone with a whiff of unjustified enthusiasm.)

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #2 –
@ersi, nah, and I don't want to see it right now.

Fifth is not compatible with our approach and focusing on WebKit (unless something changed recently) which is almost dead (except of WebKit2 which doesn't offer anything better than Blink except not being worked on directly by Google :-D).

We need to seek cooperation with other projects that would like to exploit Qt wrapper for Blink but don't want pointlessly until QtWebEngine will mature.
Yes, simply waiting is pointless, the only way to get set of required features is to fork it, but that is too much for our project to handle without help from outside.
Nadszedł już czas, najwyższy czas, nienawiść zniszczyć w sobie.
The time has come, the high time, to destroy hatred in oneself.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #3 –
Quote from: ersi on
I have not found a way to install that thing yet. What does the interface look like? Can you post some screenshots? What's the list of features?

The list of features isn't very large for the moment. It does, however, come with bookmarks (including nicknames) and notes.



There's a new feature called Quick commands, a bit like the Ubuntu HUD. Besides that the goal can be summarized as to implement what is most glaringly missing from Opera/Blink compared to Opera/Presto.

The interface is created using Javascript. I hope that won't be a bad thing, because that Github Atom editor (the Sublime Text clone) is rather slow.

In summary, this is more or less what I had expected the first Opera/Blink 15 alpha to look like.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
The interface is created using Javascript.

So they don't create something that is direct competition then, they make the same mistakes as classic Opera (nonnative UI) while ditching users with poor hardware.

:-D
Nadszedł już czas, najwyższy czas, nienawiść zniszczyć w sobie.
The time has come, the high time, to destroy hatred in oneself.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #5 –
Vivaldi comes with native sideways tabs with preview. Reason enough for me to take over from Firefox. I hope you keep up the good work, though. The roadmap looks very promising, especially beta 6.

Edit: And as indicated by the alleged Chrome browser I'm posting from, looks very similar to Chrome :D For example context menus, "Add as search engine..." and so on.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #7 –
There is something I really don't like about Vivaldi before having a try. Guess what!

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #8 –
OSX version :)

I'm going to try this browser right now.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Chr_96er on
"Add as search engine..." and so on.

We have these too. :-P

@py-thon, that is the cost of shipping custom build of Blink, it's just huge. :-/
Nadszedł już czas, najwyższy czas, nienawiść zniszczyć w sobie.
The time has come, the high time, to destroy hatred in oneself.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #11 –
Regarding a custom Blink build, I saw them boasting on Twitter that Vivaldi gets the highest score of any browser on html5test.com. However, I don't think Blink is available as a separate library regardless.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Emdek on

It had to be expected, but at least someone from their team could try to contact me earlier, and warn about these plans (as they were aware of this project for a year).


I can understand the frustration, but I also know the original Opera culture.

We never leaked. Not even once, even for projects that lasted for several years, and it took long time before we even began to do vapourware.

I consider myself good at keeping my mouth shut, but this applied to every single one in the company. In the early days there were no internal walls so everyone knew with an interest knew everything. Later partners meant more information on a need to know basis, but in any case any "leak" was a controlled one (except maybe a couple minor ones after I left).

Staying the course is a good advice, I think.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #13 –
please stay.

while it is indeed sad that Vivaldi haven't contacted you, no amount of money can buy the dedication you put in this project.
and in addition, you never know how long that new company will even exist or care about its' new product.

by the way, none of the articles I read mention if its open or closed source, or even the license their browser stands under.
I take it it's free, but closed soruce? wonder how they want to make money.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #14 –
Quote from: mihau on
I take it it's free, but closed soruce? wonder how they want to make money.

The default speed dials and such will likely play a (small?) role there. For instance, the dohop.com link includes Vivaldi affiliate info.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #15 –
I hope you stay, while I know it'll be an uphill "battle" with their much larger money prowess, what you've done up to till know is quite impressive. We don't know if they'll fold or ever feature match the old Opera too, they don't say that they will.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #17 –
Stay.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #18 –
Stay.

Vivaldi will reach a stage, where they must gain some money from their project to pay the developers and their other costs. At that point the must make some compromises with industry:
- mobile version of vivaldi which supports features of the mobile OS of the manufactorer (such as reporting home)
- enabling some kinds of tracking techniques inside the browser for the advertising industry
- implementing some kind of start page, prepared standard bookmarks ...

I bet, they cannot stay independent, even if I wish they would.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #19 –
Vivaldi is probably closed source, no native UI - what has this browser to offer for me?

Please keep up your good work, I'm already using Otter as my default browser, and as soon as speed dial, notes, and a better address bar suggestion are there, I'll uninstall Opera 12 and migrate my wife's PC too!  :hat:

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #20 –
Quote from: jax on
Staying the course is a good advice, I think.

Or perhaps that should be "Steady as she goes." ;)

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7aOWIFgIZQ[/video]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7aOWIFgIZQ[/video]

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #21 –
Thanks for all encouraging replies, it's good to know that we have supporters even in such dark hour. :-)
I'll try to add something more visible for next weekly, as soon as I'll finally complete the walking deadline(s).
Nadszedł już czas, najwyższy czas, nienawiść zniszczyć w sobie.
The time has come, the high time, to destroy hatred in oneself.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #22 –
Quote from: Emdek on

OK, now I have very mixed feelings about this:
https://vivaldi.com/#Home
It had to be expected, but at least someone from their team could try to contact me earlier, and warn about these plans (as they were aware of this project for a year).


I tend to agree.  Not contacting you seems bad form.  I admire your concept and effort.  I've been impressed by your responsiveness to suggestions.

I can't really address the "stay or go" question.  However, should access keys and such be incorporated into Otter, I'll choose Otter over Vivaldi.  Open source trumps closed in my book and I do admire the project.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #23 –
It is unfortunate, and the Opera model doesn't really make business sense (bedazzling people about the wonderful features to come attracts more customers), but personally I like it.

It does give some competitive advantage, competitors have to run faster to compete with a finished product (note: finished product, not polished product, we never delivered any polished product), it leads to more focus and less distractions during development, but most satisfyingly it is a show, not tell. Basically the traditional Opera approach to openness is quite similar to Apple.

The loss is the community involvement during development, but it is at the stage where community involvement is least useful. It also meant that if we developed a product internally for a year and a half and somebody else released some alpha product before our release they were considered to be first, that happened a couple times, but this really didn't matter.

Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"

Reply #24 –
i think it's time to say "thank you" for your great work, i've been watching otter-browser for 3 months now and i'm totally impressed how nice it already is, tending more and more to make it my everyday-browser after switching to Chrome when Opera killed Opera ;)

I read about vivaldi and installed it immediatly; after some testing i wasn't too excited about it, compared to otter-browser there were no big advantages i realised at once. For now the whole UI of vivaldi feels a bit slow & sluggish and its layout seems not to be thought to be modified by the user.

If i had to choose between those two browsers today i would choose otter browser - not at last because of it's open code.

So +1 for "stay" ;)