07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work

Cretec

@ingoratsdorf
Yep there is a reason I care. Pretty much all browsers suck in some way.You just have to find the one that sucks the least and works best for your needs. I personally already use multiple browsers, well before all of this.

Donating is good if that is what you want to do. That said they do make money off of the browser which is their revenue model. I personally do not donate to for profit companies and only open source. If they went open source I would donate to them despite being for profit as I see potential in Vivaldi.

amtcpower

I am deeply frustrated with how Vivaldi has handled the ongoing sync service issues. The status updates on the Vivaldi Status page reveal not just technical problems, but a lack of urgency and commitment to effective communication.

The sync service has been down since December 6th, and despite repeated updates, the issue remains unresolved as of December 20th—14 days later. What’s even more troubling is the vague and inconsistent nature of the updates. Phrases like “we are still working as fast as we can” and “we are hopeful to get things back into shape soon” are uninformative and fail to instill any confidence. At no point do the updates provide a clear timeline, detailed explanations of what’s being done, or concrete steps toward resolution.

The breakdown of the updates shows several problems:

Update Frequency: Days often pass without any communication. Between Update 6 (December 14th) and Update 7 (December 17th), there’s a 3-day gap, leaving users in the dark. This kind of silence during a prolonged outage is unacceptable.

Technical Management: The root cause is repeatedly described as “database performance issues” and “hardware and software problems,” yet it took until Update 5 (December 11th)—five days in—to even mention adding a new shard. Why wasn’t proactive database scaling part of the infrastructure design to begin with?

Hiding the Issue: There is no prominent notification on the main website, where the sync service is still actively marketed as if it’s fully operational. The lack of transparency is staggering. Users should not have to stumble upon the community forum or rely on Google searches to discover there’s a major outage.

Missed Opportunities for Daily Updates: With a dedicated marketing team, Vivaldi could have posted daily updates summarizing progress and next steps. Communicating progress—even if minor—would help users feel informed and valued. Instead, the few updates provided have been sparse, repetitive, and overly generic.

As someone who has actively recommended Vivaldi to others, this experience is a massive letdown. It’s not just about a technical failure; it’s about how Vivaldi’s handling of the issue reflects a broader lack of preparedness and user-centric focus. Developing the best browser isn’t enough—you need to back it with the best communication and support.

Going forward, Vivaldi must:

Provide daily updates during major outages, including progress reports, technical details, and realistic timelines.
Implement a status banner on the main website, making it clear when critical services are disrupted.
Take proactive measures to ensure infrastructure scalability and reliability, avoiding such catastrophic failures in the future.
Be transparent and forthcoming with the root causes of issues, so users understand what’s happening.
Until Vivaldi can demonstrate it has learned from this failure, I will be far more cautious in recommending the browser. A great product means nothing if it’s backed by poor service and even worse communication. Vivaldi needs to prioritize both, or risk losing the trust of its most loyal users.

EricJH

Vivaldi is a small team. I believe they are working very hard to get this sorted and get the Sync service up and running again. I wouldn't be surprised if after things got sorted we might get a more in depth description about what went down.

An example of the ethos of the Vivaldi employees is a post by Yngve in which he describes that when there is a security release coming from Chrome everybody is on it and making overtime when required to get it out of the door as soon as possible.

That's the Vivaldi spirit and why I trust they are working very hard and more than likely making overtime and why I am not pushing them.

At Vivaldi Team. Thank you so much for your hard work.

c64lover

@vladrusu said in 07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work:

@ingoratsdorf (don't shoot me) I eventually switched to Edge. The Edge UI is pretty nice to me, it has even tab grouping, AI text autocomplete and boy... it's FAST. Once you customize it a bit, eliminate that MSN abomination from the start page, it's actually decent. Also, their sync service work flawlessly. It has almost instant sync between desktop and mobile.

Changing browser because of sync given how much good stuff is provided with Vivaldi is just SILLY, you certainly aren't power user

Vivaldi is best browser since Opera 12.x and to me lack of sync makes problem ONLY because on 10 Dec I got new PC but I will clone profile from older machine and will be fine.

This is my first post on the forum and I fully support Vivaldi team.
BTW: Is there a way to see bookmarks on the Web by logging to account like it was possible at Opera 12.X time or only inside Vivaldi via sync?

DoctorG

@amtcpower said in 07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work:

risk losing the trust of its most loyal users

Something is wrong with me: i am a loyal and unpaid user and do not run away to Firefox, Edge, Brave or Opra. And i trust that Vivaldian team can fix it and make Sync better.

Ayespy

@c64lover said in 07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work:

BTW: Is there a way to see bookmarks on the Web by logging to account like it was possible at Opera 12.X time or only inside Vivaldi via sync?

Nope. Not a Vivaldi service at this time.

Osiris75

@DoctorG There is nothing wrong with that, but there is also nothing wrong with people who just need everything to work and no longer desire to deal with this. Both are very valid points.

@c64lover Saying "Changing browser because of sync given how much good stuff is provided with Vivaldi is just SILLY, you certainly aren't power user ", is not cool and not true. I love the browser, which is why I am still here, but acting like it is the only "power user" browser is flat out untrue and leveling personal attacks like that has no business here.

Vivaldi is a company, period. If they want to grow, it is up to them to make their product not only good, which I think it is, but also resilient. No matter how you feel, "this could happen to any company", "it is not a big deal", etc. It has been happening to Vivaldi now for half a month now and for many it is a very big deal. We all have different needs and also perspectives on what is important to us. Your perspectives are absolutely no more or less important than others. Just because it is not a big deal to you, it is to others.

Ayespy

@Himmelssheriff1999
As to browser quality, Vivaldi is well in advance of Brave.

As to resources, Brave started with $50 million in outside capital, and has hundreds of employees. It's meant to be a significant profit engine for a limited number of owners.

Vivaldi, partly because they refuse to monetize your data, has never earned the kind of capital Brave started with, and has a development staff in the 20's.

My guess is that perhaps four of these are qualified to participate in the Sync fix, and I know they are working day and night to get it done. This requires some hardware upgrades, some rewriting of sync code, and the migration of data from millions of accounts. These are just the realities. Those of us who simply can't find a browser that satisfies their daily operational needs as well as Vivaldi are content to wait for the fixes to be completed, tested, and deployed. Substantial progress has been made (my sync under the new improved conditions is working perfectly, but it's not yet ready for public deployment).

Consider an Israeli Kibbutz vs an American industrial farm. The first grows a few hundred bushels of clean, healthy and high-quality produce to support themselves and sell at local farmers markets over the year, in the process doing zero harm to the environment. The second produces hundreds of tons of medium-quality produce, grain, whatever, which contains poisonous chemicals and is highly profitable, while in the process helping to destroy the ecosystem of the planet. I think of Vivaldi as being an economy more similar to the Kibbutz model, except that millions of users benefit from the work a a few, without contributing anything other than their clicks on some partner links (which are transparently identified to users), and their criticisms of Vivaldi and its business model.

Finding fault with with the company, which is employee-owned, or the devs in topics such as this actually has zero positive effect, other than the emotional satisfaction, feelings of superiority in spite of zero knowledge concerning the task at hand, and the warm feelings one experiences from denigrating something with which they are not satisfied.

Still, we don't limit such commenting. Users are entitled to their feelings and opinions, irrespective of the fact that the basis for these may have no bearing on the issue at hand. Sync will be fine soon, I'll wait, and in the meantime will not waste my energy on negativity.

Catweazle

I understand completly that for some users it is a big issue to no have sync, especially at this time, when many want to use a new device.

Yes, Vivaldi is a small cooperative that by far cannot be in terms of resources at the level of other large companies with external investors, which Vivaldi does not have in order not to lose independence, as we are seeing now with Mozilla, and even less so with companies like Google, Apple or M$ that have more income than many countries. Neither with Brave, with support from Cryptocompanies and Facebook.

Even so, Vivaldi offers more services than any of them, Google aside, with ethics, transparency and user-centeredness like no one else.

Is it annoying that sync has now crashed and recovery is taking longer than expected? Of course, but these are things that can happen after so many years and this is why it is always advisable to make a backup of important data, as in any software, precisely to have the data at hand in cases like this.

Changing to another browser for this reason, at least for me, is exaggerated, it is like changing a good car after years because of a problem that may take some time to fix, because the workshop has to order a part, to another worse brand.
With the difference that Vivaldi is a free product, despite it's features and services which no other browser has, not even some paid ones.

Osiris75

@Catweazle I agree mostly with the ethics, but not too much with transparency. With it not being fully open source and with a pretty lame reason for it being so. Until then, they are not transparent.

Not sure what you mean by services. Functionality wise, there are other browsers that match it for most use cases. The reason I choose Vivaldi is that those other choices are either unethical, too new, or don't have cross-platform.

DoctorG

@Osiris75 Your accusation is really weak. Nobody wants to give results of hard work to internet thieves, who sell all what they can.

Cretec

In the end, it has been 2 weeks down. We can all spin how Vivaldi is this or is that, it is good, or it is bad. The fact, right now, a major part for many people is down. Anyone trying it out, for the first time, and goes to see how it syncs, it is broken. Features don't mean much if you cannot even sync them.

No matter how you want to spin it, it is a black eye for Vivaldi. People who want to use it don't care if they are small. Many people don't even care about the ethical side or even know about it. I do, but many don't. All they care about it something that functions. We are almost at 2025, people expect a modern browser to work and sync across devices.

Ever since I retired from working for others, I have been running a small business. We have had our issues. If that affects our clients, do you think they care that we are small? No, they want what we give them to work. If it doesn't they go somewhere else. I appreciate some people's loyalty to a brand as a small business owner. However, what is more important is if the tool, which a browser is, works.

Osiris75

@DoctorG Just because you don't understand open source and proper licensing, doesn't make something weak. Nothing that Vivaldi has is something that cannot be done, and most have already been done.

Catweazle

@Osiris75, only part of the UI is proprietary and even full auditable and also moddeable by the user, the only thing is you can't fork it for another browser (what Google and MS have on their wishlist for Chrome and EDGE).

Mozilla has it way easier to make FF OpenSource, because there isn't any big company which use Gecko in the market, all big companies use Chromium or maybe WebKit in the Apple world.

Nothing to do with transparency respect the user, but with the survival of Vivaldi and other small Chromium browser manufacturers.
The simple existence of Vivaldi Auto, something that Google itself has not managed to get into this area so far, shows that 100% OpenSource is not always the best option in a market saturated with ~100 browsers, mostly Chromium.

DoctorG

@Osiris75 said in 07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work:

you don't understand open source and proper licensing

Open Source license does not protect owner rights.
But i think that is a useless discussion about FOSS and weak licenses.

Well, you are not happy.

j4j4

Time to do a rename.

Vivaldi ~~syncs~~ sinks

Osiris75

@DoctorG Thank you for explaining you don't understand Open Source licenses. There are many and yes many protect the owner's rights. Anyway you are right, it is off discussion. That said, Vivaldi is not fully transparent.

You guys have talked about Brave, and I agree on the crypto crap which is why I do not use it. However, it is fully open source. Has the absolute best ad blocker, something I wish Vivaldi would use, and has had no problem growing to over 10x Vivaldi's size with everything out there to see.

DoctorG

@j4j4 said in 07/12/24 | Sync Doesn't Work:

Time to do a rename.

Vivaldi ~~syncs~~ sinks

Such comment stinks.

Osiris75

@j4j4 Not cool and you have seen I have my issues with Vivlaid, but I do think they are a good company. Just don't agree with all their decisions.

Ayespy

@Osiris75 With 100X the marketing budget, yes it has grown to 10X the size of Vivaldi. It also plays on user paranoia, which is a powerful marketing ploy. Also it's "FOSS," which is the be-all and end-all for some users.