Strange name of browser
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The biggest bug I have found is the NAME.
Most average people cant read or pronounce the name Vivaldi.
Nor do they care about some 250 year dead composer.
FIREfox, Chrome, those are names that get millions of installs.
I understand and respect that you want to honor Vivaldi and think it is an awesome name. It is, but it is not a name that gets installs. I don't want to see this browser die. I PURCHASED OPERA, back when you had too, and mourn it everyday.
Thanks
//MODEDIT: changed title
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Most average people cant read or pronounce the name Vivaldi.
Are you serious? If so, you probably know only illiterate idiots
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I am dead serious. Most people(USA at least) have terrible education.
I fix computers and see these barely-literate people all the time.
It would be funny if not so sad and a urgent warning sign for the state of this country.
But anyway, I just wanted to point out that a name like "Fast Surf" or something silly would be more likely to be installed. (And the user would know what they are getting)
I am not talking crap about the Vivaldi name or product.
Thanks
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@realdead_man - Vivaldi's target public coming out of the gate has been former old-time Opera users. I am one of these. The moment I saw Jon S Von Tetzchner was making a browser named Vivaldi, I was on board. The name was part of the reason for that.
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@Ayespy And I too, Ayespy.
My heart fell when newOpera was sold to Chinese.
I jumped for joy when I heard about Vivaldi.
Which brings me to another point, I only heard about Vivaldi through an obscure online tech-geek mag.
I just want everyone to enjoy the web free from the IE/chrome/firefox hegemony !
)yes I know, vivaldi uses Chromium
*edit typo
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@realdead_man: Yeah - turns out there's LOTS of these obscure online tech-geek mags, and Vivaldi is in bunches of them, including ones published in Finnish, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Icelandic, Indian (Hindi), English, Italian, etc. Jon has been doing interviews with everyone.
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@Ayespy lol
Maybe Vivaldi is a way popular name outside the US.
Maybe the other-than US market is enough to keep Jon's coffers filled.
I don't know. I was just speaking for the poor ignorant rednecks in my neck of the woods. "That new-fangled VIVALAS-audi quattro browser" I can hear it now. lol
(lots of cartoon rednecks in my town too)I wish nothing but the best. Vivaldi is my primary browser indefinitely.
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Hmm. What's in a name? Back in the earliest days, whilst various browsers were somewhat descriptively called Mosaic, Internet Explorer, or Navigator, others were called such improbable names as Slipnot and Cello. Moreover, within a few years, 'Opera' appeared, followed by names like Konqueror, K-Meleon, Phoenix (which evolved into Firebird, then Firefox), Seamonkey, Maxthon, Avant, and (to me) one of the most unlikely browser names of all: 'Chrome'.
I've used most of these over those many years for brief times each, but I settled early upon Opera and long remained with it because of its configurability and innovation. When Opera stripped out many of its configurability elements a few years ago when it migrated to chromium, I soon migrated mostly to Firefox to recover some of that usability - but then a similar stripping-out process began there. Then Vivaldi arrived, and over the past couple of years, I've found myself using it more and more until it's now virtually in use full time here (~98% of the time).
My point? Nowhere along the way did the name of the browser ever really matter. I was after usability and customizability, along with a good measure of built-in functionality. When a browser possesses those elements, word gets around; and users to whom such things matter will gravitate to it. Naturally, it won't necessarily become the most popular browser in use - but, based on personal observations over the years, I believe there's some degree of inherent conflict between flexible, configurable, feature-richness and a browser designed primarily for the 'masses' or 'market-share'. As with many serious users, I'm far more concerned with what a browser does than what it's called.
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@realdead_man: Interestingly, the highest concentrations of users of OldeOpera were never in the US. They were always in places like Russia, eastern Europe, Scandinavia, India and, paradoxically, Japan. Jon built it to over 50 million users in those markets and, even had he not had other successful business concerns, would have become independently wealthy off of that usage alone. Its revenue when he left was in the hundreds of millions as I recall. Interestingly, Vivaldi's uptake is following a similar pattern - and is well ahead of the user numbers that OldeOpera had at this stage of its development. The revenue model is different than it was with OldeOpera (that was a pay-for license in the beginning), and this browser doesn't pay for itself yet (Jon is funding the entire team and all activities out of his own pocket), but I think there's little doubt that it will pay for itself, and for the time being, that is actually its only goal. Jon and Tatsuki are not looking to conquer the world with it - just to fill the hole being left by the flight of feature-rich browsers from the marketplace.
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Ayespy, that is another point for me. Why should Europe hog all the browser. lol
Maybe I am wrong, it probably would be useless and wasted effort to change the name anyway. It is just....when I tell my small circle of friends, even my WIFE, "Vivaldi" ....I feel like some kind of internet snob. (I am BTW)
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@realdead_man: Why should Europe hog all the browser? That's easy. U.S. users are too dim to care about or make full use of a feature-rich browser. If it's more than point-and-click, it's "too complicated." (Being US born and bred my own self, I'm afraid I tend to agree in large part with a certain comedian who likes to say "Americans are stupid.")
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This conversation made me curious where the most users of vivaldi reside at the moment - so I looked it up on alexa.
(I used vivaldi.com for this because that is where the download area is based - and yes I know that this is no "real" user count ^^)
So here is what came around (btw .net has a slightly different ranking)
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@zaibon: Yeah. I probably artificially inflate that US visit count all by myself. Vivaldi keeps tabs on what the authoritative feedback from website visits (reporters like W3Schools, StatCounter, W3 Counter, etc.) has. As far as the "percent of usership by origin points" of Vivaldi browser visits to websites across the globe, the US is 'way down the list. Enjoying a higher per-capita usership of Vivaldi by unique user count, are places like:
Kyrgyzstan
Estonia
Uzbekistan
Japan
Czech Republic
Serbia
Iceland
Norway
Belarus
Finland
Poland
Russia
Ukraine
Germany,
Slovakia
Taiwan... -
It's slightly OT i know, but then again the two main thread protagonists did somewhat seed the ground for me... reading this sad indictment of US, as one who's not from there or lives there [but had two business trips there for extended periods in the late 90s & very early 00s], rather tends to play right into the hands of we who have a rather jaundiced view of your place & your citizenry. The election of trumplethinskin did nothing to allay our apprehensions about the stability & credibility of the whole shebang.
During those aforesaid trips, thank goodness for the internet, without which it'd have been hard to impossible to keep up with world events. Had i limited myself to the 50 squillion cable tv channels available to me at the time, the rest of the world would have officially not existed. Dare i quip; sad! Endlessly amusing/astonishing to me back then were two experiences; first in a restaurant in the top left hand part, wherein our waitress thought Australia was Austria; second in the bottom middle part, where my interlocutor had no idea at all what Australia was ["Is that somewhere near Alabama?"]. Oh my.
Back OT, & not to be unduly disrespectful [other than the entire preceding para, that is], the concept that someone would try a browser or not try a browser on the basis of its name, completely astounds me. As has been already said far better than i would have, every historical & contemporary browser has an utterly illogical / irrelevant name; at least Jon's name-selection basis is grounded in strong internal logic. It's the features, functions & performance that matter, pretty well nothing else [albeit lots of purple would always seduce me]. Opera12 was revelatory for me & i loved it as much as any pretending-to-be-grown-up woman should decently claim affection for some gatherings of 1s & 0s. Its demise was tragic, its heir-apparent celebratory. IMO anyone who namechecks anything as a basis for adoption or not, is a deeply scary person [& they probably contributed to your new Prez coming into being]. SAD!
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Tower = Maui 17.03 x64 Plasma 5.9.3.
Lappy = Maui 2.1 x64 Plasma 5.8.4.
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"Any one who name checks...."
That hits close to home. I almost passed on Seamonkey cause of the name.
Like it or not, people do have conscience and unconscience biasis for things. Whether it be words or skin color or whatever.
Not many would name a program " Snotty browser for rich people 2.0" but that's what a person might read in Vivaldi.
But as has been said, the USA market is not needed. So moot point I guess.
Interesting posts though.
Typed on my phone. Forgive typos
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hello realdead_man
A Thank You given to Blackbird for mentioning K-Meleon The first browser with tabs though that is not what the layers were named back then the tabs took on a nom that users will convey, accept, repeat. Can hope that vivaldi will be around so long that we will wonder what did we used-to call it? vivaldi? my friend's browser and my browser too. -
Apart from the music of Vivaldi, which is also lively, the word conjures up thoughts like Vivacious, Vivacity, or Vivace = very fast and lively.
