We will be doing maintenance work on Vivaldi Translate on the 11th of May starting at 03:00 (UTC) (see the time in your time zone).
Some downtime and service disruptions may be experienced.
Thanks in advance for your patience.
Multi-Account Containers
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@ctb That profile design is the easy part.
The tab part is the difficult part, because all tabs are hard associated with the Browser Window they are contained in, and the Browser Window (one or more) is hard associated with the Profile, in which the Cookies are stored. It is not possible to have more than one Profile in one Browser Window (which why Other Profiles, Private Window (which is a new profile), and the Guest Profile all opens as new Browser Windows, associated with the selected Profiles).
Having Multiple Profiles in a single Browser Window will require a MASSIVE redesign of the Chromium Profile management, and it will have to be maintained. We don't have the resources to do that.
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That is very sad because Firefox is making questionable choices and we have no real alternative. Sure, there are things like the Zen browser but I do wonder how long it will take for the choices of the Mozilla board to trickle down to those browsers. People are leaving Firefox in troves because of these choices of the board and we Firefox users are sort of stuck. This feature, I use it for privacy and have used it for years and just cannot live without it.
I know switching profiles is a choice but it is not a choice that really works. I have ten containers setup and to replicate that in profiles would be a huge pain. And since the containers work automatically, I would forget to switch profiles and all the privacy of that would fly out the window.
Thanks for the reply.
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What about something like this from Edge:
"Automatic profile switching (available in Microsoft Edge 83 and higher)
We’re also excited to announce a new feature to help you get to your work content more easily while using multiple profiles. We call it Automatic Profile Switching. If you’re a multiple profiles user, you can check it out by trying to navigate to a work site (a site authenticated with your work or school account) while in your personal profile.
When we detect this, we will prompt you to switch to your work profile to access that site without having to authenticate to it. When you choose the work profile you want to switch to, the website will simply open in your work profile.
We hope that this will help you keep your work and personal data separate and help you get to your work content more seamlessly. In case this doesn’t work for your flows, you can choose “Don’t ask me again,” and it will get out of your way."
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@ctb I have no idea how they implemented that. My guess is that they "cheated" (And one "cheat" is that they can't do that without loading all the profiles into memory when launching the browser, and check their cookies etc. for each navigation; which AFAIK requires quite a significant patch on the navigation system inside Chromium).
I'll also note the major difference everybody seems to forget: we have a couple of dozen developers, developing for 5 different operating systems (plus Chromium updates, which take 3+ weeks each time). The Edge team likely has multiples of that, working on a single Operating system target, or project.
Developer and Security Expert at Vivaldi.
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Vivaldi is also (according to
chrome:inspect/#apps) running as a Chromium App.@yngve I guess the decision on accessible resources is likely already made by the enclosing (Window) instance and the only way around that would be something like:
- ditch large parts of the existing UI code and do something completely dfferent
- have the tab → profile decision be made by C++/native-level
Vivaldicode - create something like identities API to tie JavaScript UI code to container-like providers?
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@yngve Last month, the developers of one of the other major Chromium based browsers stated that they are “actively considering the much requested functionalities of Containers and Workspaces” (source). Let’s hope they extend Chromium with containers and that it benefits other Chromium based browsers as well.
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@karlemilnikka great news from the Brave team, hopefully they'll push their solutions back to the open source which will be quite a significant contribution, and the Vivaldi team can use it. Their current ETA is like end of year, which is great.
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@berektes
I am not so hopeful on that.
They never contributed anything back to Chromium. Ever.
They will open source their containers implementation but.... considering how they treated Brave forks in the past... they sued them lol.
My guess... they will have a license on it similar to shields.
Shields is open source but nobody is even considering to fork it and add Shields in their browser.
Not even now with all the MV3 situation.
Why? Because they demand on the Shields license the fork to include a Brave logo in the adblocker..
Imagine if Vivaldi added Shields. They would have to add a Brave ad in Vivaldi lol.
I am sure they will do something similar for their containers implementation.
I find their whole stand so hypocrite considering their browser is more than 90% a fork, code developed by someone else.
I am afraid we would have to use Brave in order to use their containers implementation.
I don't believe Vivaldi would ever consider adding their implementation and also add a Brave ad in Vivaldi. -
@yngve said in Multi-Account Containers:
Also, keep in mind the differences in scale and resources between the teams. Both of those teams are AFAIK multiple times the size of Vivaldi's. At the very least the Edge team can easily afford to put dozens of developers on a project like this. We can't.
For Edge I got it, but for the others... I don't... what's the link in between the number of people working at Vivaldi and this feature?
When I look at only few example of chromium browsers that already have this kind of feature:
- Arc / The Browser Company: around 50-60 employees
- Shift Browser: around 60 employees
- And according to Wikipedia, Vivaldi had about 54 employees in 2021
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@xorel As far as I can see from their website, the Arc browser uses profiles not multi-account containers. Vivaldi has profiles too, as do all chrome based browsers. Actual containers would require a whole new feature which would be a big development task.
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@xorel Arc to my knowledge has profiles and not containers. If you have other info please share.
Also Arc got heavily funded , created a browser and 3 years later they said , we will create another new browser and Arc is in tatters.
I think Vivaldi is doing much better in longterm -
Yeah, Arc doesn't even support Linux, from what I saw. I would have moved to it for this feature alone.
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@yngve Are you saying you're not going to implement "containers"??
Let's put this clear - Users have been asking for this feature since 2018 on this forum. I'm starting to suspect that the Vivaldi team just don't know how to implement this feature...
Then why don't you accept help from other developers that are willing to help?
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@ihazar I am saying that implementing the functionality and maintaining it is going to be too heavy a task for our team, we don't have the resources for it; I have already tried to do what was essentially a "minor" change in how cookie domains were handled, in order to implement what is today known as "Partitioned cookies", by the time we had passed through a few Major Chromium version update cycles, there were essentially nothing left of my patches, I would have had to start all over again. That is going to happen with an independent container implementation, too.
As for other developers, please allow me to reintroduce you to what I wrote back in January.
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@nixtrema This feature is all I need.
In my case my company uses a vpn that controls all traffic.
sO I want a workspace for work where I can't use vpn to access company's private network services and I want to have an workspace that uses a vpn or my surfshark vpn extension to be able to do whatever work or investigation or personal affairs without being monitored by my company.
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@yngve It's unfortunate that this is so difficult (I thought it would be super easy, barely an inconvenience).
Is it an idea to try to crowdfund for this particular feature? I would love to switch to Vivaldi for several reasons, but the constant logging in-and-out is a no-go. I'd happy contribute financially if that can speed things up (within what a normal person can contribute, naturally, so many would have to pitch in).
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@janterjea You and others may wish to read the article "The reality of long-term software maintenance from the maintainer's perspective"
It will answer the question of "Why won't this open source project accept my 10,000 lines of code patch? I've done all the hard work!".
A couple of quotes:
I would estimate that writing the initial code for a feature is about 25% of the total work involved for that feature. The rest is maintenance
browsers [...] In those cases I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio is more like 10%, or even less
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Reminder for everyone to go VOTE on this feature request in the Chromium Project repo. The more traffic they see there, the more probable they might work on it.
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@yngve I think you might be missing the UX aspect here. Arc browser didn’t solve this by replacing profiles with something else — they made it seamless for the user. Behind the scenes, creating a new Arc Space actually creates a separate profile, but the user doesn’t have to go through the entire onboarding experience again.
For example, when I create a new profile in Vivaldi for work (using the same Vivaldi account), I have to complete the entire onboarding process again in a new window and re-sign into my Vivaldi account. Also, the switch between profiles isn’t happening in the same window — it always opens a separate one.
Why do I have to go through the full onboarding again just to create a new profile? Is there a technical reason why the existing account data can't be reused? Even if there is, I assume there are ways to minimize the switching friction and reduce the number of clicks required when creating a new profile.
- Just to clarify, I don’t have experience in this specific domain, but I have been a system architect and software engineer for over 10 years. This isn't a complaint — it's genuine feedback and a UX-focused question, because I do believe profiles are actually a good solution and the main issue can be solved from the UX side with different user flow for creating profiles.*
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@LonM I would think this type of solution (profiles) would be acceptable to most users when implemented in a similar way as Arc, where profiles can be tied to workspaces. I work for multiple clients with a workspace for each, and just need a way to separate browsing data between them. What I don’t want is having to run multiple profile windows of Vivaldi with multiple instances in my dock.
