Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android
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Vivaldi just launched on Android with a built-in Ad blocker and tracker protection. But in addition to privacy, speed, and ample features, it sports a unique user interface. Let’s take a look.
Click here to see the full blog post
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Now it's time for Vivaldi for iOS!
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@dawidpajak: We hear you
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@dawidpajak Watch this video in full and you'll know more:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/46291/interview-with-jon-von-tetzchner
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I want to be able to open the side panel with a swipe from the left side and I want it to be instant or close to it. Very close to switching.
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Nice try, but after few days I returned to other browser because of battery draining. Usage 18,5% is too much. But I keep my fingers crossed to Vivaldi and I will check next version.
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Please make it so that when you hold the home button at the bottom the adressfield in focused. That way you don't have to stretch your finger to the top everytime you want to type an address.
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@FlowXD said in Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android:
My current browser is Samsung Internet, for 2 reasons. The first is the video player, which is feature rich, works on any video and has a great UI. The second is the dark mode, works really well on any website. Though, Vivaldi on android is a good browser and is improving greatly
You can enable dark mode UI in Vivaldi settings and you can set "force dark mode for web content" to "enabled with selective inversion of non-image elements" if you search "dark" in Vivaldi://flags
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@dawidpajak: i don't know if it has changed now, but apple forced every third party browser to use an outdated version of his webkit implementation, to make sure safari will still be the best browser on iOS.
If this is still true, i wouldn't like to see vivaldi forced to use other than his own (and great) code. Every other browsers has yielded, reducing their work to a safari skin. Let's see what happen with vivaldi.
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@FlowXD said in Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android:
@mossman: Wasn't aware of this thank you, is this available as a toggle afterwards or do I have to go the flags every time?
It's one of thousands of flags in the Chrome engine. It will stay set after you change it. Vivaldi could add a toggle to the UI settings for it but I expect it hasn't been requested by enough people. I only know about it since it was mentioned by someone else on these forums a few months ago.
There is a feature request section of the forum so maybe you could suggest or vote for it there...
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Features request (please @OlgaA and Android team):
- Extensions
- Bottom address bar
- Auto switch to desktop mode when my phone is in landscape
- Close vivaldi when all tabs is closed
- Manual import/export bookmarks
- Set default search engine for Private Tab
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@alespg: yeah, I know Android is much more flexible and iOS has it's own limitations, but even if it will be just a "skin" (it won't be ), I think it's always better than nothing. Same as with ad blocking - they didn't wanted it, but it's all about choice. I could sacrifice the engine in the name of bringing Vivaldi's unique features to iOS
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@Jarlhissig said in Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android:
I want to be able to open the side panel with a swipe from the left side and I want it to be instant or close to it. Very close to switching.
Hmm, how do you combine it with web-page feature like on this forum - if you swipe from the left, the forum menu will show up.
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@kebabisgott said in Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android:
Please make it so that when you hold the home button at the bottom the adressfield in focused. That way you don't have to stretch your finger to the top everytime you want to type an address.
You can do this now by double tap - meaning first tap on the SD button to go to SD, then instead of SD button you have a search button - pressing it will focus the address field. Going to SD is instant so I would argue it is even faster than long-tap.
Also setting address bar to the bottom is requested in another post. It may be another way to solve the stretching finger issue you raise.
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@dawidpajak said in Why it’s time to switch to Vivaldi on Android:
@alespg: yeah, I know Android is much more flexible and iOS has it's own limitations, but even if it will be just a "skin" (it won't be ), I think it's always better than nothing. Same as with ad blocking - they didn't wanted it, but it's all about choice. I could sacrifice the engine in the name of bringing Vivaldi's unique features to iOS
The thing is that Vivaldi's unique features are implemented on top of Chromium and are tightly integrated with it, so it is not possible to put them on top of webkit just like that - they would need to be re-developed on top of webkit from almost scratch, which means double effort. So to work efficiently Vivaldi needs to reuse its features code already used on desktop and Android.
Fortunately as Jon mentioned in around the middle of the interview, there is some Chromium-on-top-of-webkit iOS version of the engine (if I understand correctly), which makes it viable to port Vivaldi to iOS also, though it will still take a significant amount of time, as it is still a small company. In any case, rest assured, they are committed to ultimately bring Vivaldi also to iOS. You can help them speed up by promoting Vivaldi among your friends and family, but I guess you are already doing it.
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I think Apple's inflexibility and monopolistic behavior will take its toll sooner or later, becoming obsolete with its Safari and Webkit. Microsoft has already understood this a long time ago, switching to Chromium and Blink with its Edge.Personally I would never use Apple products, precisely because of its lack of flexibility and its poor price / performance ratio.
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@wojcieche It isn't an incompatible idea. In Yandex for example you can swipe from any part in the border of the screen to switch between tabs. If you start the dragging sightly more in the inside of the page (as opposed to from the outside edge of the screen) it pulls the forum sidebar instead. The same can be said about Android 10 touch navigation gestures, I'd be more worried about them.
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That`s really so!
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Love this, but why no Android TV version to coincide with this change? I'm no developer but it's effectively the same platform already and this would make sense. I would love to be able to use Vivaldi on my Shield TV.
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@psaulnier , yes, but TV don't have touch screen like mobile or tablet.
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