Vivaldi for iOS
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@16patsle said in Vivaldi for iOS:
and I expect they will just use that (Chromium) as a base
Not on iOS. iOS will always us Webkit (Safari) as an engine. So i see no benefit of Vivaldi on iOS expect for bookmarks if you use sync.
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@16patsle said in Vivaldi for iOS:
Chrome on iOS has managed to find a way to exists though, and I expect they will just use that (Chromium) as a base, like they did on Android. Getting it through App Review could prove to be tricky though. Worst case scenario Apple decides it doesn't like (aka won't allow) one of the key features of Vivaldi.
It uses Webkit not Chromium (which is a fork of Webkit from years ago), any browser or app must use Webkit on iOS.
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@Chas4 So what is the purpose of asking for Vivaldi when you cannot use the features? If Apple seeks to control everything, it is time to leave Apple. They are spying just as bad as Google.
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@Knuthf Syncing would be the only real benefit, one imagines - that, and seeing a Vivaldi-themed Webkit...
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@jon shares some insights about iOS in the following interview:
TechCentral interview
If you watch the video it starts at 19'52'' -
I recently shifted from Chrome/Firefox to Vivaldi on Mac, I am seeing myself slowly going back because of following 2 reasons:
- I am not able to access my bookmarks on iOS
- I am not able to see my open tabs on iOS.
Vivaldi is a great browser on Mac and I really want to stick to using it but every now and then I miss above features and I have started using Chrome/Firefox for certain things after complete 'no-use' of those for 2 weeks. I think its just matter of time the convenience of information being accessible on all devices will take over all the good things that Vivaldi offers on desktop.
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@amit0 That's why Apple forces the "walled garden" approach. To enforce customer loyalty. It's by design that their products are only compatible with their products.
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@amit0 said in Mobile Vivaldi for iOS:
I think its just matter of time the convenience of information being accessible on all devices will take over all the good things that Vivaldi offers on desktop.
I'm not exactly sure what this sentence is trying to say, but for Chrome or Firefox to takeover the space Vivaldi currently owns on the desktop would require a complete rewrite of their user interfaces, and I don't think either of them would be willing to open up their browser to the kinds of end user modifications that Vivaldi provides.
More likely, it's just a matter of time until there is an iOS version of Vivaldi, though I don't anticipate that being this year. I vibr could be wrong, but Vivaldi typically takes its time in order to release a solid product later rather than a flawed product earlier.
But I know how you feel with the bookmarks. I've currently got >120k bookmarks in my library, so you can see I'm a heavy user. But for years I had Vivaldi on the desktop and could never find a good home on Android. I went through phases of various browsers, with long stints on both Chrome and Firefox.
So here's how I was handling bookmarks until Vivaldi Android was released....
Vivaldi Desktop is my primary browser, it's data is my authoritative data. If I had any bookmarks saved in other browsers I imported them into Vivaldi and deleted all bookmarks in that browser. Then I ran deduplication on Vivaldi and organized my library. That is now the complete collection of all bookmarks, well organized and without duplicates, mostly.
On Android I had several browsers installed, but Chrome and Firefox got the most use. You can try importing your bookmarks into their desktop versions and syncing them to mobile, but once my library got to a certain size, both of them started having unresolvable issues. For real, months of work on the Firefox forum and nobody could fix my problems.
Firefox actually ended up working better for getting bookmarks created on mobile into Vivaldi than Chrome, but I can't recall Chrome's exact problem now it's been so long since I used it for this.To access my bookmarks, i found it best to export my bookmarks to HTML and host that file on a web server. If the file gets large it's easy to split up into multiplies and theme ot however you like. I actually have a speed dial like page that is the home page on Android for bruisers that aren't Vivaldi, and it just links to my bookmark files as a well. Both Chrome and Firefox struggled with importing and syncing my bookmarks. It was better not to have my library in them to make getting mobile bookmarks synced to the desktop work well.
Bookmarks created on mobile end up in a distinct folder when synced to the desktop. So I would have the Android browser sync seth the desktop version, and then every so often I would import those bookmarks into Vivaldi and delete them from their source browser (Chrome or Firefox). A quick deduplication gets rid of the dupes. Then just drag & m the folders & bookmarks from a bookmarks manager tab and into their correct location on the bookmarks panel.
The dedupe process would only take a minute or two maximum with the "Bookmarks clean up" extension. How long it took to sort the folders and bookmarks into the correct locations depended on how well they were sorted when they were created. Every so often I export my bookmarks and modify the file to create the webpages on the internet.
It's not an ideal solution, but Vivaldi on the desktop is so much better than the browsers that did sync bookmarks directly that it was worth it. As you do it a few times, it gets much faster, and you'll surely tweak the process to suit your needs. I created tens of thousands of bookmarks this way, possibly over a hundred thousand.
Now that Vivaldi is on Android, I no longer do this obviously. The giant bonus is that Vivaldi's default UI enables a superior UX for creating a large number of bookmarks and returning the browser to the state before you opened all those tabs.
Hope this helps somebody. Vivaldi was just worth the work. Especially considering neither Chrome nor Firefox could really support my use case anyways.
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Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Vivaldi Technologies, returns to TechCentral for a fascinating discussion on the world of Web browsers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhkkFcEwCBo&feature=emb_title
He also talks about Vivaldi iOS in this video.
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@luetage said in Mobile Vivaldi for iOS:
@altcode Vivaldi's UI on the desktop is based on web technologies (html, js, css), this cannot be moved to mobile afaik. iOS apps are programmed in swift and android apps in java.
iOS apps can be programmed also in C/C++ (they are compiled by Xcode natively or by another C/C++ compilers, which might be more troublesome but not impossible), C#/Java (in virtual machine), JavaScript (it’s common nowadays) and any other interpreted language. As far as I know blink is written in C/C++, so Vivaldi is written in it too and large part of its code could be reused. Only the UI code should be rewritten and the code which interacts with the blink engine (and replaced with code interacting with WebKit). Moreover Blink is a fork of WebKit so large parts of it should have similar structure and some parts could be identical. So porting Vivaldi from Blink to WebKit could be simpler than it looks like. However I’m not acquainted with the code of any of these browser engines so I can’t say it for sure.
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@alexander-gorbovets said in Mobile Vivaldi for iOS:
However I’m not acquainted with the code of any of these browser engines so I can’t say it for sure.
Let's just go with what Jon said then.
Apple does not allow us to use the same code on iOS, so it requires a lot more work to deliver on that platform. We do hope, however, to provide an iOS version sometime in the future. Ideally that would be through Apple allowing us to reuse our code, but we aim to make it happen anyways.
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Perhaps this has already been mentioned; But in these turbulent times, Apple also sells fewer iPhones. It would also be to their own advantage if they listen to their customers a bit more; For example Chrome browsers -as Vivaldi- allow in the iOS appstore.
I have a love / hate relationship with Apple myself; Apple is very dominant; For example, in the Safari app store, it blocks most (good) ad blockers.
But the macos interface is really sublime. And just like that for iOS; See for example this (Dutch) bookmark overview on the iphone below. Maybe interesting inspiration for the iOS Vivaldi browser? -
Not having chromium on iOS stopped no one else, so it's kind of a moot point IMO. One of the major reasons why people pick a browser is for sync capabilities between different platforms which is why you have Chrome, Edge, and Brave on all platforms (though brave is taking forever for full sync).
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@tgienger said in Mobile Vivaldi for iOS:
Not having chromium on iOS stopped no one else, so it's kind of a moot point IMO.
And it is not stopping Vivaldi either, that's not what this thread or the company has said. The point that had been made, time and again, is that the technical details of implementing a browser on iOS vs Android means that it is more efficient to adapt the code to Android than iOS; so it makes sense to and is a more efficient use of Vivaldi's (very) limited resources to do Android first.
Jon, and the commentators here, have not said that an iOS version will not be done, just that it is more complicated and more work than doing the Android version. This point is unaffected by Chrome, Edge and Brave, or anyone else having released an iOS broswer.
We should always take care when trying to compare the work of those mentioned browsers to Vivaldi. Microsoft and Google are enormous MNCs (multinational corporations) with relatively boundless resources available for the development of their browsers. Even Brave is orders of magnitude larger when comparing the resources they have for development -- more than triple the workforce with significant outside funding. Vivaldi is funded by the pockets of its founder, and does not have to try to recognize any ROI for various angel or other investment firms. It's a generous gift, but it is built using far fewer resources than the browsers to which it is so often compared.
Keeping this in mind, one should be able to better understand the methods of operation Vivaldi employs, as well as more accurately manage one's expectations of when and what will be released to the public. Vivaldi will be releasing an iOS version, but I would not expect to get my hands on it for a couple years, similar to the patience we needed to exercise while waiting for the Android version. That patience was rewarded.
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First off, very interesting thread. It can be rare to see civilized discussion in an online forum these days.
Anyway, I have started using Vivaldi as of today and it's really cool! As an iPhone user, lack of an iOS app is unfortunate but I believe I have found a workaround to syncing at least some content between devices.
Before starting to use Vivaldi, I had recently made a Pocket account so I could create "bookmarks" with tags - on a side note, if someone could point to another extension, program, or browser that does this, I would appreciate it. While trying to find a workaround to syncing content from Vivaldi to iOS, it hit me - I could add to Pocket any tabs/links/etc. that I want to open up in an iOS browser, which would be Firefox in my case. Then, I simply open Firefox on my phone, create a new tab, and open whatever tabs/links/etc. that I want to "sync" between my devices. To make this workaround more seamless, I set Firefox on iOS to load the Pocket website by default when creating a new tab.
I realize this is far from an ideal solution and may not work for everyone and may not even work for me as I have just started to test out the practicality of this workaround. I also haven't fully explored the privacy implications of using Pocket for this purpose (this, along with other reasons, is why I'm moving away from Google in the first place). Of course, feel free to point out any potential issues with this workaround.
My hope is that this workaround could be of use to others grappling with this issue, especially if they are already using Pocket! :smiling_face_with_open_mouth:
NOTE to more experienced members of this forum/community: please let me know if I should move this to another thread or start a new one with the above workaround.
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Welcome to the forum, nice first post. That's a pretty good workflow you've created. Everyone works differently, so what matters is that it is efficient for you.
In the years I spent waiting for a mobile version of Vivaldi I too was using Firefox. I mostly cared about getting bookmarks created on my phone into my desktop instance of Vivaldi. So I used Firefox's native sync capability, then on the desktop I would export my bookmarks from Firefox, import that into Vivaldi, and run a deduplication process.
I ended up running into a lot of issues with Firefox's sync function, and couldn't keep a copy of my entire bookmark collection synced in it. So I would just delete all bookmarks after exporting. Even then I eventually got into a state with some undeletable bookmarks, and crap like that.
So it was far from an ideal workflow. I had an html file that was an export of my bookmarks from Vivaldi that I uploaded to a web server and could access that if I really needed to, but I would also just message myself with links from my desktop if I just wanted to send like 100 or less links (in the window panel I would right-click / copy address & paste that into my message).
I wouldn't really recommend that workflow for many. It served its purpose for a time, but perhaps the greatest thing it did was increase my appreciation for the stability of Vivaldi when it did become available on Android. I have an enormous bookmarks library, which has challenged every mobile browser & sync service I've tried. Vivaldi, despite being the least mature of all the browsers, has been the most capable & has presented the least issues. It was a long wait, but my patience was rewarded with a great browser.
Edit: the one part of that workflow I would recommend, as I still use it frequently, is sending myself messages with a bunch of links. You need to use a tool that works on both the desktop & mobile device -- Signal supports all the major platforms.
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Thanks for the welcome! It's been a couple weeks of using Vivaldi and so far, so good. Though I have to say it's not that different from using say, Chrome, which makes sense since Vivaldi is based on Chromium. This is a good thing since it should make it easier for people like me to adopt Vivaldi. Of course, there are tons of features like screen capture, the ability to move tabs, split-screen tabs, and web panels, that put Vivaldi in a different class.
Anyway, back to the iOS "issue". It didn't even occur to me to send links to myself - I am often accused of over analyzing/complicating things, and rightly so. I will try it out, especially since you suggested using Signal, something else that has piqued my interest since I decided to move away from Google (and Facebook for that matter) as much as possible. It's also good to know that Vivaldi's bookmarks tool is robust, as I've already imported all my bookmarks from Chrome to Vivaldi and will be using Vivaldi as my primary bookmark storage location moving forward.
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@armmat eh, for the most part, people who say we overanalyze things are just less rigorous thinkers. There are important exceptions, of course, like matters of the heart, but technical matters rarely can be overanalyzed, in my opinion.
Signal is great, multiplatform -- meaning iOS, Android, Windows, Linux & mac. To send stuff between your phone install & you computer there is a conversation labeled "Note to Self" which I find extremely useful. I'll also use it for drafting messages that I don't want to send prematurely to someone else, or save a draft to send later.
Vivaldi is certainly robust when it comes to managing bookmarks, its one area where Vivaldi is superior to all other browsers in my opinion. I've got over a hundred thousand of them, so it obviously scales. On the desktop I recommend using the Bookmark Manager (which is in a tab) and the Bookmark Panel for doing organization & other maintenance. But I'll leave it at that so as to not derail this thread too much. If you have bookmark questions start up a new thread and I'm sure you'll get help, feel free to tag me in it if you want to get my attention.
Happy Surfing
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I've been following this topic for a while as seamless syncing is one of the things I consider a needed function, so not having an iOS Vivaldi port is basically a deal breaker in me using the desktop browser.
I noticed a lot of comments regarding the UI needing to be redrawn in iOS - because it's rendered in html/css/js on other platforms. I don't think this is a correct statement. Most Chromium based iOS ports completely recycle the UI components used on Android. If you look at the new MS Edge, Brave they all use HTML/CSS based UI's on iOS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that there is no additional development work needed to make the iOS port, but the idea that a UI has to be rebuilt from scratch and written in Swift is not correct.
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I know, I can hear the groans already but I have to ask. When, oh when will there be an iOS version?
I have been using Vivaldi for its specific features for years now and have always yearned for the ability to have the Vivaldi browser on my portable devices as well. If I could have the continuity of the same browser on all my devices I would definitely switch to Vivaldi only. Because I cant I only use Vivaldi sporadically on my Mac's. I doubt I am alone in this so it was with some disappointment that I saw an Android version released recently. I know it is difficult to fulfil Apple's crazy requirements but if Chrome can get away with it anyone can. Please let me know if it's at least on the drawing board.
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