New convert from Firefox: My experience switching and the features I miss
-
Hi. This is my second day using Vivaldi, and so far I’ve (mostly) enjoyed my experience. I thought I’d give you some feedback as a long-term (over ten years) Firefox user fresh to your browser. +: I really enjoy how I can assign keyboard shortcuts to be anything I want. Coming from Mozilla where the hotkeys are what they are, and you either have to install an addon or write a script to change them, it’s refreshing to have this level of customization baked in. -: There are a few hotkeys Firefox has that you don’t. Specifically, I’m missing Ctrl+Shift+PageUp and Ctrl+Shift+PageDown: the hotkeys that let you shift a tab to the left or right. I’m aware that you can drag tabs around, but I really miss the ability to organize tabs using the keyboard alone. I also can’t figure out how to assign Backspace to a hotkey. (I’d like to assign Backspace to History Back and Shift+Backspace to History Forward.) Backspace just deletes whatever hotkey is already there, so I can’t get Vivaldi to recognize that I actually want to make Backspace the hotkey itself. +: Mouse gestures! I love that mouse gestures are a built-in feature. -: No customization of mouse gestures. I guess I’ve been spoiled by FireGestures. I’m used to writing my own gestures and assigning them to whatever I want. [strike]I also miss wheel gestures. I used them to switch tabs: RightHold+WheelUp for previous tab, RightHold+WheelDown for next tab.[/strike] (Disregard! I just realized RightHold+Wheel works out of the box, and exactly for what I want it for! The devs are mind-readers. :)) I didn’t use rocker gestures myself: RightHold+LeftClick and LeftHold+RightClick, but I’m sure many others did and would like that feature, too. Equally important is the ability to DISABLE certain gestures. Just as you let the user turn off selective hotkeys by clearing the default shortcut, you ought to allow the user to choose which mouse gestures should be enabled, instead of having them all on or all off at once. +: I love that I can place bars wherever I want. Address at the bottom, panel to the left or the right, tabs anywhere I like—it’s so freeing! -: But I can’t combine bars, or selectively edit within bars. Specifically, I miss being able to drag off navigation buttons from the address bar—I never use them, I use hotkeys and mouse gestures exclusively—and using the extra space for something else, usually addon buttons. But most of all I miss being able to combine all my bars into one slim bar that takes up barely any vertical space, leaving more room for content. On my own setup, I’d dragged the URL field into the tab bar and just had one bar at the top, with a few addon icons off to the side. Firefox recently implemented status bar on hover, which I also miss. Instead of always having the status bar visible, eating up space, it would only pop-up when you hovered over a link, revealing the forwarding address. I can sort of recreate the feature by toggling the status bar on and off with a hotkey when I want to peek at URLs, but this is pretty kludgy. Would be nice to have the URL just appear on hover, like a tooltip. -: Flash. This was the biggest negative in my switching experience. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. Though I knew Flash was installed because I had it in Firefox, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t appearing under vivaldi://plugins. It took a bit of searching and some frustration to figure out I needed to have the PPAPI and not the NPAPI version installed, or Vivaldi wouldn’t recognize it. Please make this more obvious to new users. A note during the installation process, a little readme file with the download, or a blurb on the first-run or about:plugins page—just notify the user somewhere that they need PPAPI, not NPAPI. -: Performance. I know this is a beta, but still, Vivaldi is pretty sluggish. The interface is quite slow to respond. There’s a pause whenever I switch tabs, close tabs, or open new ones that has led me to double-close or double-open on more than one occasion. It just doesn’t feel snappy. Hopefully with newer versions you’ll be able to optimize the browser and it will respond more instantaneously. Thank you for this program, and I hope that you find this feedback useful in some way.
-
Thank you for the info.
I customized my own userChrome.css and userContent.css back in Firefox. Is the process at all similar in Vivaldi? Where do you place the files? Does Vivaldi even use a profile folder? I’m still trying to figure out where everything is.
I guess the big question is, if I can hide the navigation buttons, is the extra space reclaimed by the address bar, or does it just become dead space? Would really appreciate an answer before I devote the effort.
-
If you hide stuff, the rest takes its place, the magic of flex.
-
Thanks, Sajadi, for the paths, and An_dz for your tutorial from that other thread. Very helpful info.
Here’s what I have so far. My objective was to merge the address and status bars, maximize the number of visible tabs without scrolling, and minimize clutter. I settled on vertical tabs (works equally well with left or right alignment) with the address and status bars on bottom. I did not touch the panel at all.
.vivaldi,.newtab,.trash,.window-buttongroup,.button-toolbar,.button-addressfield,.button-toolbar-small,.tilingtoggle,.imageactions,.pageactions,#zoom_control,#header{display:none!important} .addressfield{border:0!important;margin:0!important} .toolbar-addressbar{position:fixed!important;bottom:0!important;width:100%!important;z-index:1!important} #status_info{text-align:right!important;padding-right:5px!important;z-index:2!important} #tabs-container{border:0!important;padding:0!important;width:30px!important} ```Would appreciate any advice, as the method I used to merge the address and status bars was less than elegant, and I had to sacrifice flexibility to achieve it. (The address bar is fixed at the bottom, since the status bar is fixed at the bottom by default. Ideally, I’d like both to remain merged even if they were moved to the top.) On the bright side, status on hover, woo!