Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC
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@Blackbird said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@Hadden89 ... Vivaldi should really have no excuse at this point to not support it as well as there are at least 3 other Chromium browsers that I've tested that do support this. ....
It's not about excuses, it's about reasons. If Vivaldi's developers have to patch (and test) chromium each time it's updated just to enforce unencryption in a portable version of Vivaldi, that extra effort may well constitute a solid reason in their judgement for not taking that step given the number of potential users. As with many jobs, there will always be 1000 things crying to be done with only time for 500 of them to be addressed... so triage must be applied, and that means prioritizing scope of the needed workload versus the overall importance of the task involved. Just to emphasize, continually patching chromium updates to apply that unencryption is a never-ending task until (and if) chrome ever elects to make it an integral part of their own codebase - and what may be easy for one browser architecture is not necessarily as easy for other designs.
@Blackbird Thorium is made by a single developer, not a team. And he was able to provide Thorium releases quite regularly while maintaining no encryption. And the browser is actually damn fast to use.
Let me emphasize that again. It's made by ONE guy.
I've always liked using Vivaldi every since version 1.0 when it came out. Used it on and off for many years. But it was never the fastest, nor the most stable. The features that are added are mostly gimmicks to me. I don't need a browser with integrated Notes or Mail or whatever. It should just work as a proper browser, not a Mail client. There are way better Mail clients out there than this. But I get it, I guess this was so important and is just one of the features that the team of busy Vivaldi developers are focused on, otherwise it wouldn't have been a thing.
When it first came out, it was quite innovative. It supported tab stacking, vertical tabs and a few other features that actually enhance your browser workflow. But now, a lot of these once unique features can be found either integrated into Chromium based browsers directly, or through some other extensions. Vivaldi has lots its edge over the years, it's nothing unique to me anymore.
I'm a huge power user when it comes to browsers. I use probably over 100 extensions and userscripts and some of them I modified myself. I also have 200+ tabs (due to work, I need to research a lot). Whenever I trial a new browser, I always have 99% of the same setup, i.e having the 100+ extensions/userscripts installed and having all my 200 tabs. With Vivaldi, it would always lag and performance just isn't that great. With browsers like Brave or Thorium, they are a lot better and way more useable. I get that the use case for everyone is different, but personally I think Vivaldi has just too much junk features implemented, like the Mail client and the Razer Chroma.
I can't take comments like this seriously knowing full well that some of its features are so completely useless and literally unrelated to what a browser is.
Just look at Thorium, it's one of the fastest browsers out there because it focuses on optimizing for CPU instruction sets like AVX2 and SSE3 etc. Instead of focusing on actual browser optimizations and improvements, Vivaldi went the other route.
Anyway, I'm happy with other browsers and have since moved on many many months ago. Maybe I'll try Vivaldi again one day.
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@chaoscreater Thorium doesn't have and never will have even a fraction of the features I rely on. I don't rely on portability or milliseconds-faster speed. I actually don't know anyone who does.
But you want speed and portability, so you should probably use Thorium rather than come to the Vivaldi forum and complain that it's not Thorium.
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@Ayespy said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@chaoscreater Thorium doesn't have and never will have even a fraction of the features I rely on. I don't rely on portability or milliseconds-faster speed. I actually don't know anyone who does.
But you want speed and portability, so you should probably use Thorium rather than come to the Vivaldi forum and complain that it's not Thorium.
How exactly was I complaining? My first comment in this post was from 2 months ago back in December 2023. I have since moved on to Thorium. Someone replied my old message from 2 months ago, I simply replied back and also stated I'm happy with using Thorium now.
Someone needs to learn how to read.
And at this snail pace of a response to old replies, it's no wonder Vivaldi takes ages to release anything these days.
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@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
... I can't take comments like this seriously knowing full well that some of its features are so completely useless and literally unrelated to what a browser is.
Just look at Thorium, it's one of the fastest browsers out there ...
Different browsers target different users and their needs/habits... always have, always will. Whether you take my comments seriously or not, they are accurate and reflect the real world. Vivaldi, in turn, reflects the focus that its designers and owners have targeted, as do some of the other browsers out there, whether or not they reflect your particular browser focus at any given time.
One developer can built a collection of software tweaks and features on an externally-provided codebase and issue a branded browser that will have great appeal to certain users... but as time goes by, will he be able to keep supporting it year in and year out? Will it attract and hold enough users to merit enough market revenue to begin to pay back his efforts? The software universe (and especially the browser star system) is replete with examples of designs that burst on the scene from the efforts of a single designer or micro-team, lasted for a year or a few, then evaporated as the developer gave up, drowned in costs, lost interest, or found his work obsoleted by waves of external digital "change".
Making a portable version is a design decision, pure and simple. Whether a browser's developers feel it is worth their effort in the task and economic universes in which they work is up to them alone... the marketplace will ultimately decide whether they were correct or not.
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features are so completely useless and literally unrelated to what a browser is.
How exactly was I complaining?
Like that. Perhaps "complaining" would not be as accurate as "trashing Vivaldi."
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@Hadden89 said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@chaoscreater Brave also do chromium patching to enforce an unencrypted portable.
Is not something which can be easily enabled universally that way or official. [2]I didn't know that this was the problem. So Chromium needs to be patched? So I assume Opera also does this? And I assume Firefox works in a different way?
@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@Hadden89 Not sure about whatever is patched in Brave, but Thorium browser supports no encryption and so does UnGoogled Chromium. Vivaldi should really have no excuse at this point to not support it as well as there are at least 3 other Chromium browsers that I've tested that do support this. I've stopped using Vivaldi anyway, started using Thorium and it is way faster and better in so many different ways.
Yes good point, if others can do it, so can Vivaldi. It's not a must have feature for me, but it would be kinda cool to be able to put Vivaldi on a USB stick and use it on other PC's.
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@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
When it first came out, it was quite innovative. It supported tab stacking, vertical tabs and a few other features that actually enhance your browser workflow. But now, a lot of these once unique features can be found either integrated into Chromium based browsers directly, or through some other extensions. Vivaldi has lots its edge over the years, it's nothing unique to me anymore.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. I still can't do all of the stuff in other Chromium browsers that I can do with Vivaldi, so it still has an edge. But I do understand that other browsers are faster in certain scenarios, like when you use 200+ tabs. But I use about 50 to 100 tabs, and it's fast enough for me. It perhaps also depends on how heavy websites are. But for you Thorium is probably indeed the better choice. From what I've seen it's way too barebones for me.
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@RasheedHolland Things may be changed since I checked, but as I recall:
- Firefox always been portable not having encrypted user data (and having a different engine).
- Vanilla Chrome/-ium and closer relatives (thorium, ungoogled etc) encrypt data by default but can unencrypted/made portable with small patches and flags.
- Separate branches, in which we can consider Brave, Opera, Edge [and Vivaldi] need more work (because the un-encrypted profile should blend with their additional services and code, like sync for example)
- Un-encrypted profiles files might be not more compatible with regular/encrypted installs.
- Vivaldi sync relies on encrypted data, which could be an issue on implementing portable.
Said such, I totally agree that a portable package would be very cool, at least for standalone installs
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Anyone knows where are the Russian OperaAC Devs?
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@Blackbird said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
... I can't take comments like this seriously knowing full well that some of its features are so completely useless and literally unrelated to what a browser is.
Just look at Thorium, it's one of the fastest browsers out there ...
Different browsers target different users and their needs/habits... always have, always will. Whether you take my comments seriously or not, they are accurate and reflect the real world. Vivaldi, in turn, reflects the focus that its designers and owners have targeted, as do some of the other browsers out there, whether or not they reflect your particular browser focus at any given time.
One developer can built a collection of software tweaks and features on an externally-provided codebase and issue a branded browser that will have great appeal to certain users... but as time goes by, will he be able to keep supporting it year in and year out? Will it attract and hold enough users to merit enough market revenue to begin to pay back his efforts? The software universe (and especially the browser star system) is replete with examples of designs that burst on the scene from the efforts of a single designer or micro-team, lasted for a year or a few, then evaporated as the developer gave up, drowned in costs, lost interest, or found his work obsoleted by waves of external digital "change".
Making a portable version is a design decision, pure and simple. Whether a browser's developers feel it is worth their effort in the task and economic universes in which they work is up to them alone... the marketplace will ultimately decide whether they were correct or not.
@Blackbird A browser that focuses on features other than actual browsing performance and browsing-specific capabilities/features is missing the complete point of a browser. That's an objective truth. My smart-fridge also has a built-in browser, but it'd be an insult to compare that browser to the actual browsers out there.
I get that different browsers target different users. But when there's a mountain of issues to work on and you get the devs to spend hours working on a feature that simply takes your Razer Chroma mouse lighting profile and replicate that in the browser, then is that really a good direction to head in? You're literally telling me, Vivaldi is targeting a very small group of users who just so happens to use Razer Chroma mouse, just to have a lighting profile for looks and gimmicks. Yeah, real good use of development time and really shows the world where your development priorities are right there.
Even though Throium is just made by one developer, at least he's building browser-specific and useful performance enhancement features. Even if he drops support, I can easily migrate all my profiles and addons etc to another browser. That's how I did it with Brave -> UnGoogled Chromium -> Thorium. That's the beauty of having truly unencrypted portable browsers. The idea of encryption is stupid because if you have Bitlocker enabled on your drive (fixed or portable), the data would be encrypted anyway, so what's the point of having browser encryption that cause way more issues than what it's worth?
Also, the point I was making earlier is that a single developer could achieve unencryption on Thorium and so the excuse of Vivaldi not having enough developers or not having enough time to work on XYZ is just moot. One guy can do what a team of Vivaldi developers couldn't.
And the points you've made also apply to Vivaldi. That's why it's never been able to capture much market share, despite it being out for years and years. So how is that different to someone using Thorium/UnGoogled Chromium or whatever, VS someone who uses Vivaldi?
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@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
One guy can do what a team of Vivaldi developers couldn't.
Why do you think dev team needs to copy Brave or Thorium features? Because you want?
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@chaoscreater You can discuss and complain over months or years here in forum, dev team very rarely visit here.
I do not see bug reports on Vivaldi not being a portable app. No reports, no change. Thats a fact. -
@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
... @Blackbird A browser that focuses on features other than actual browsing performance and browsing-specific capabilities/features is missing the complete point of a browser. That's an objective truth. My smart-fridge also has a built-in browser, but it'd be an insult to compare that browser to the actual browsers out there. ...
Your personal preferences are driving your definition of what a browser should be, and that is not objective truth. You place "performance" and something you call "browsing-specific-capabilities/features" as the basis of your definition - but that is not "objective truth", it is your subjective opinion. In reality, others may have many other elements they want in a browser to enhance their use of it and how it performs for them. A browser should browse websites, certainly... but also browsing email may be a basic desire for many users. Browsing instantly is another desire of many users, but ability to deeply detail-craft browser settings is another desire of many users. Jon von Tetzchner cofounded Vivaldi as a "browser for our friends" and it was intended to reflect his (and others') view of what a browser should contain, just as when he cofounded Opera back in the day.
If you want a racecar, buy a racecar. If you want a limousine, buy a limousine. If you want an eco-friendly sedan, buy that sedan. But don't expect the attributes of one to be reflected in the other and don't diss the developers of one because they don't provide the attributes of the others - they're all cars... THAT's objective truth. Don't expect the attributes and design goals of one browser to be reflected in another browser - that's why there are multiple browsers out there. Use the one that best fits your personal tastes and needs. But don't pretend that one is more or less of a browser just because it doesn't align with your personal tastes and beliefs.
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@chaoscreater said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
I get that different browsers target different users. But when there's a mountain of issues to work on and you get the devs to spend hours working on a feature that simply takes your Razer Chroma mouse lighting profile and replicate that in the browser, then is that really a good direction to head in?
I do get your frustration a bit. I see that they have focused on things that I do not care for in Viv 6.6, like the sidebar web panels. I could live with that, if they at least fixed a couple of annoying bugs, but they didn't. Seems like most of their time went to the new features and fixing other bugs. I still can't stack ALL tabs via mouse gesture. I still have the bug with ''one character'' nicknames in the addressbar. And I still can't search for text that's written on top of an image. So I'm afraid I will have to stick with Viv 6.1 for now. So yes, I'm a bit frustrated, I'm not going to lie.
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@Hadden89 said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@RasheedHolland Things may be changed since I checked, but as I recall:
- Firefox always been portable not having encrypted user data (and having a different engine).
- Vanilla Chrome/-ium and closer relatives (thorium, ungoogled etc) encrypt data by default but can unencrypted/made portable with small patches and flags.
- Separate branches, in which we can consider Brave, Opera, Edge [and Vivaldi] need more work (because the un-encrypted profile should blend with their additional services and code, like sync for example)
- Un-encrypted profiles files might be not more compatible with regular/encrypted installs.
- Vivaldi sync relies on encrypted data, which could be an issue on implementing portable.
Said such, I totally agree that a portable package would be very cool, at least for standalone installs
I somehow missed this post, but thanks for the info. So from what I understand, it's not that easy for Vivaldi to add this feature? But I wonder if encryption is necessary in the first place, because infostealers (malware) can easily hijack cookies and passwords from the browser profile. Not to forget, password recovery tools can easily decrypt stored passwords. So even someone with physical access to your device can steal them. So what is this encryption good for? I mean it has to have a purpose.
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@RasheedHolland Perhaps not impossible, but hard: a lot of chromium code relies on encryption by default (extensions, sync,...) and changing things can cause easily side issues (likely breaking interoperability). Sync also should be updated to encrypt plain data before any upload - which is likely what firefox does (but has its engine so more control) - because ok the trust, but I think not too much people will send its data to any server without encryption (also I think won't be very EU compliant)
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@Hadden89 said in Plugins disappear after moving Vivaldi Portable to another PC:
@RasheedHolland Perhaps not impossible, but hard: a lot of chromium code relies on encryption by default (extensions, sync,...) and changing things can cause easily side issues (likely breaking interoperability). Sync also should be updated to encrypt plain data before any upload - which is likely what firefox does (but has its engine so more control) - because ok the trust, but I think not too much people will send its data to any server without encryption (also I think won't be very EU compliant)
Well, I'm not going to pretend I understood everything. But if other browsers like Opera can be made portable, so should Vivaldi in my view. Also, like I said before, I don't see how encrypted user data protects me at the moment, because malware can easily steal passwords and cookies with all Chromium based browsers, since password encryption is a joke in Chromium. And I don't even use Vivaldi Sync.