Possibly unique in my approach
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Hi guys. I have been using the Vivaldi browser on my Windows 8.1 PC for a week and will give it a go as my default browser, that taking over from Flashpeak Slimjet, another variant of Google Chrome. My installation crashes a lot if I try to do various mundane things like resize the windows by dragging, for example, but mostly behaves itself when I stick to normal use.
However for me normal use is not quite normal for two reasons and I have almost finished making my own alternative to Speed Dial, which I think is awful. I have only to finish adding the links to make it complete. The idea occurred to me yesterday and I have built an array of five rows of ten that, with text underneath each image to say what each is about. It fits beautifully into one page without any need for scrolling. This actually is a WORD file saved as an html object and replaces my 6 X 6 standard array in Slimjet.
The speed dial in Slimjet is not so hot but in Vivaldi it is far worse. Partly that may be because I use my HD television as the monitor where, in that capacity, the resolution is 1366 X 768 and the Vivaldi icons are huge, so much so that it is useless. What I have done is to make my own, starting off with screen prints and tailoring them to make a far better result than any speed dial I have found as an extension on Google Play. Not only that, I get to decide on the images and can have a useful and completely readable amount of text underneath.
The reason I like Vivaldi is largely, but not entirely, down to the fact that my monitor display is not quite as large as I would like. I have two PCs, the one I use most being in my living room, so I view the monitor about ten feet away with single vision spectacles I had made in the right strength just for watching TV without any eye strain. My eyes are pretty good without glasses, even at the age of 72 and I am long sighted and do not need to use any even for driving. Up close, reading unaided is impossible because my accommodation has largely gone.
The attraction of Vivaldi is the ability to tailor the user interface so readily and frequently switch on and off features like the address bar, status bar and even the tab bar when I am watching TV with the PC rather than using the digital signal to the TV which, where I live, is first class. Used in this way the images via the PC are almost always pretty good if not perfect and I like to use that to multi-task while listening to a programme where the sound is mostly of interest, rather than the images or I wish to switch between watching the TV and using the PC, the latter usually with several application on the go concurrently. I do also listen to music a great deal while on the PC, so web radio gets a lot of my time and is a real boon as I have a passion for classical music on a par with my photography and also like modern jazz and the more informed forms of most kinds of popular music,
My other PC is mostly used for graphics work as I am a photo maniac and, as an amateur have been thoroughly obsessed by pictorial photography since the age of nine, from day one doing my own processing, which I learned from my father. I am only interested in photos of sufficient aesthetic quality to print up to two feet wide and grace a wall in a frame. If you are interested my website has a selection of my best landscape pictures, especially those in the albums for South West USA and Slovenia. I may have to move from ipernity if, as feared, they do close down.
Because I usually have so much on the screen of my PC at one time, I like to size and position windows precisely so that everything is in neat order and completely manageable. With a theme of my choosing and keyboard shortcuts and gestures tailored to my preference, Vivaldi enables me to optimise how everything on the web appears on screen and to quickly change settings of interest to optimise that, depending upon what I am doing.
I only hope that as Vivaldi matures, more of the Chrome extensions will work with it and they get rid of the many bugs. I would not have decided to try it as my default browser were it not for the fact that even if they do not, none of the glitches so far seems too much of a problem and in the week I have been using it, web pages mostly seem to load very quickly.
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There are already numerous votes for improvements to speed dial in the Feature Requests thread.
You might find that it helps to reduce the UI Zoom in Settings, Appearance to fit more speed dials, and reduce the space taken by the GUI.
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@Pesala That would not work for me, as I would be having to change from about 15% to 100% back and forwards all the time. Besides, though an enormous amount of work to make, my solution is far superior to anything else there is, at least for me.
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Hi, UI zoom is not page zoom, check tools > appearance > user interface zoom.
Cheers, mib
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@mib2berlin If I change UI zoom to suit speed dials on my monitor, other needed details become impossibly small. I am happy with my custom solution, even if it was a huge amount of work to build and I doubt if there ever would be a reason to change. My 50 dials, up from the 36 I have been using on Slimjet for a long time will not need changing, so the effort was a one off and, for me since being retired I have the time, well worth the effort.
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