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

Maybe it's a Unix thing but Vivaldi loads fast for me on Ubuntu and macOS.

 

I posted about this issue in the uBlock thread and others said that they also didn't see any blank spaces, I have no idea if it has got something to do with my filters in uBlock. I just know that when I enable Vivaldi's adblocker, those annoying blank spaces disappear. And somehow it sometimes also removes certain ads and annoyances that uBlock doesn't automatically block.

To clarify, it's a small annoyance and it doesn't happen on all sites. And it's about website loading, Vivaldi itself loads quite fast.

 

It's probably how you've configured uBO's filters.



I just have the bog-standard presets, I'm not an advanced user.

 

I have configured it in the same way, so I guess it will remain a mystery. I do hope that Vivaldi will make the ad-blocker more user friendly with a bit more info, like in Firefox. They really dropped the ball on this.

 

Have you checked that uBO hasn't become corrupted or anything like that? Might be worth uninstalling then re-installing uBO.

 

Yes, people have told me this before, I do think I have reinstalled it months ago but it still won't remove the blank spaces, very weird. Another weird thing that I noticed is that I don't get to see the Cookie Crumbler in the Vivaldi Privacy settings, see link 2.

BTW, about Tab Stacking, I was using the Two Level option, but I now see that Accordion Tabs is a better option for me, it's quite handy if you open let's say 30 to 50 tabs like I often do, you should check it out, it's way better than I thought.

https://vivaldi.com/new/
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/cookies/#Hide_Cookie_warnings

 

Vivaldi's just weird. I recommend Ben Chesire's Cookie Notice Blocker.

 

I have never heard of this one before. To clarify, I was already using the "I don't care about cookies" extension, but accoring to Vivaldi it can now block those annoying cookie notifications itself, but this setting is nowhere to be found in Vivaldi 4.1 for some reason.

BTW, in uBlock you can also use certain lists that will block cookie notifications, the problem is that some sites won't load correctly, so that's why the "I don't care about cookies" extension is still the best option for me because you can quickly disable it per site.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-care-about-cookies/fihnjjcciajhdojfnbdddfaoknhalnja

 

I was quite surprised just how good Cookie Notice Blocker really is. It blocks a lot of nag screens.

 

Appreciate this mention. I had no idea either but it's effective after reading this post and installed it.

 

You're welcome. Yeah, it's pretty effective. I just wish there was a version for Safari. The notice blocker in AdBlock Pro isn't anywhere near as good.

 

BTW, my bad. I was able to find the settings in Vivaldi Privacy, you need to select ''Manage Sources" and then you can select additional blocklists.

Opera 12 used to be my favorite browser, but Vivaldi is by far the best browser I have ever used. I have used Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Opera, Firefox and then I switched to Vivaldi. Vivaldi basically is what the new Opera Chromium should have been, but they got sold to some Chinese company so I wouldn't trust them anyway.

Firefox Quantum was also a huge disappointment. I do remember that I didn't make the switch to Vivaldi before 2.0 was released, I remember that Vivaldi 1.0 wasn't that good, it had very high CPU and RAM usage, glad they fixed this.

 

I've run Vivaldi basically since it was a beta. Mostly on Ubuntu, although I did later run it on Win 7 as well. I never had higher CPU or RAM usage than any other browser. Maxthon was my default and preferred portable for long time on Windows, with SeaMonkey a close second. Firefox has always run well on Unix for me. Although Mozilla turned out to be the disappointment. As a consequence I don't use Firefox often. Maxthon has basically morphed into Opera and is probably owned by the same Chinese conglomerate for all I know. Jon von Tetzchner is an idealist I think, a bit like Shuttleworth (Canonical). On both Ubuntu and macOS Vivaldi is my most used browser. At first I thought Tetzchner had made a mistake using the Blink rendering engine. In retrospect it was an astute move as it enables Chrome extensions and add-ons to be used.

 

It's good to know that Vivaldi is running just fine on the macOS, because I might buy a Mac in the future. BTW, I was thinking about Vivaldi's business model and I'm a bit surprised that they didn't make a deal with Google. Even Mozilla makes $500 million a year, mostly because of Google paying them to be the preferred search engine in Firefox. Also, I noticed a new browser named Sidekick that is focused on corporations, perhaps Vivaldi can make a "Vivaldi Pro" version that can compete with Sidekick.

https://www.meetsidekick.com
https://medium.com/codex/why-i-switched-from-google-chrome-to-sidekick-browser-63979c873897

 

I think Tetzchner is too much of an idealist to make deals with Google. He's also a big Linux fan apparently.

 

Well, at the end of the day it comes down to making money, I really hope Vivaldi will somehow survive.

Well I believe Blink was the only realistic choice because Chromium is based on it. The other choices were Gecko and WebKit which is used by Firefox and Safari, but they don't exactly have a huge user base, so no wonder that Opera, Edge and Brave all went for Chromium.

 

Hopefully.



It's lasted six years though.

Blink is a fork of WebKit.

 

4.1.2369.21
Minor update (3) for Vivaldi Desktop Browser 4.1
August 20, 2021
https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/minor-update-3-for-desktop-browser-4-1/

 

You may soon translate text bits in Vivaldi Browser
August 21, 2021
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/08/21/you-may-soon-translate-text-bits-in-vivaldi-browser/

 

Didn't think Translate was working. But went to Chip.de & it worked perfectly.

 

I can't believe that Vivaldi is already 6 years old, time flies for sure. And I also didn't know that Blink was based on WebKit. But I did read that eventhough Apple started development of WebKit, it was Google who was actually the largest contributor to WebKit's codebase and they started to develop the Blink engine around 2013, interesting stuff. Before that, Chrome was still using WebKit ever since it was introduced back in 2008.

https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html

 

WebKit's an old engine and has very little to do with Google. It goes back around 22 years or so to the KDE HTML engine and the even older Konqueror browser. I believe earlier versions of Maxthon used WebKit.

 

Yes correct, Maxthon did use WebKit and I never understood why on earth they didn't switch to Chromium/Blink sooner. The weak point of Maxthon was that they didn't support extensions, at least not advanced ones.

I'm afraid that the translation feature isn't working correctly on many sites, they shouldn't be releasing stuff that they didn't test extensively. BTW, I have to say that the Two Level stacking feature is a life saver, because I often open about 50 to 70 tabs. And I figured out that you can fix certain annoyances with the "Always Activate Related Tab" feature, but it doesn't always work as expected.

 

I confirm Vivaldi's translation service doesn't work on many sites; don't translate all text, don't appear on some sites if few lines are in English, etc.

 

Yes they need to work on it, because I also don't like it that translation is being done dynamically. For example Amazon has a better translation system that they are using on amazon.nl for translating reviews from example Spanish or Italian to Dutch.