Things Vivaldi Could Improve On
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Hi Everyone, I'm pretty new to Vivaldi, and far the last many weeks I've been using it. I've also been playing around with many web browsers. I've played with Chrome, Firefox and ChrOpera a lot this year. The best one turned out to be ChrOpera, though I still don't love any of them, especially Chrome. Now I'm playing with Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Edge. Alright, as requested, here are a lot of things I would like to have improved in Vivaldi. I know there is already a Vivaldi feature request, so for the purpose of this post, I'll lean the topic towards the improvement of Vivaldi overall and it's engine, Blink. I'd like to add these features on Vivaldi in the future: The ability to use keyboard commands to move tabs left and right of the tab bar, so I don't have to use the mouse to do that. Pair that with being able to right click a tab for the option "close tabs to the right", and it would make it easier to close links I had opened temporarily. Actually closing the edge of the tabs in a maximized and minimized window, both with the tabs set on top and on the bottom of the screen(I like having my tabs at the bottom of the screen). Being more compatible with popular websites(my friend gave me this suggestion). Being able to remove extension buttons set beside the search bar. I want the stock UI but without the uBlock Origin ad blocker button stuck there. Improve the Speed Dial. Make it more like the new Opera that I've used. Create flat UI background images for all popular sites like the Opera Speed Dial. And/Or create the url name with a colorful background if that's too much work. Add things like an option to turn on hardware acceleration, Turbo mode, and a menu UI kind of like the one Firefox has. Or at least a new, smart way of implementing the menu, such as putting it in the panel, or having it turn into a pop up window like the settings or the quick commands. I don't know, the menu is nice, but don't change it for nothing The option to have tabs stay the same size, and have you scroll through them instead like Firefox. Create a "Reader Mode" like what Edge, Safari, and Firefox have. It's awesome to be able to read articles with big text. I know Vivaldi can make the page load without pictures, but having an actual reader mode on the address bar with the same features as the other ones would be awesome, and to have it light up like Edge when the mode is available for a website. And on reading articles with big text, if not Reader Mode, have some tool to be able to increase the text on a page(with a keyboard shortcut). Have toggling the panels, status bar, menus, etc. all transition with smooth animations. Popping in, sliding out, something like that, kind of like the "ask Cortana" panel slides. Would make for a modern feeling browser. Speaking of Ask Cortana, it would be awesome to have a feature like that in Vivaldi so you don't have to manually search something up in another tab. But not really something so cheesy like Tony the lava blob. On that note, whenever I toggle the panel in and out, the page stutters back and forth. It would be great to have a smooth transition a la Apple style(or Ask Cortana style) of moving the page back and forth. It would be great to right click on a page and have a personalized click menu pop up like Edge has, with it's own options personalized for the browser by the creators. One thing I would also love to see with the right click menu is a "search with" option, where hovering over it gives another list with Vivaldi's set search engines to search the thing selected. Then, add another option below that saying "image search with" and do the same thing! I always like searching and image searching for things on Google by right clicking them, so it would be great for Vivaldi to implement that so I there is no need for an extension. Another thing would be great is Vivaldi's own dictionary in the browser. It would be great to search up a word without having to "search" that word on Google. I could just highlight the word and have a pop-up appear with the definitions, origin, pronunciation, of the word itself. Have it powered by something like Websters, or some really good dictionary. If more definitions are needed, the user can then click the expand button on the bottom of the box and expand it to show other definitions, or click a link at the bottom to a dictionary site. Remove the door from the home button. That makes it more minimalistic and modern. Have the title of the website show on the menu bar for all websites. An option to delay tab loading in background when you first open up the browser, like Firefox. I sometimes have multiple YouTube videos in different tabs and I wish I didn't have to stop each video after I open Vivaldi. Basically come up with lots of keyboard commands to add to the list so we can set them and be much less dependent on the mouse/trackpad. I want to use the keyboard much more. Fix some of the color UI errors on some websites. Some websites had a blue header at the top and Vivaldi turned red. One super cool thing I once experienced in a linux distro was whenever I made a YouTube video go full-screen, the video wouldn't just stutter to full-screen, it would smoothly grow into a full screen video, animated. It was very cool and felt modern and intuitive. It would be cool if Vivaldi achieved that effect. Speaking of animations and transitions, think of how you can use these in every action in Vivaldi that smoothly goes from one part of the browser to the other in a way that makes sense(like Material Design). Make the browser lighter, take up less CPU like it currently promises. I notice heat issues using Vivaldi. I started noticing it with ChrOpera on it's last few updates as well. I haven't used Chrome in a long time, so I can't say if it's the Webkit/Chromium engine, but it seems like it is. And speaking of the Webkit/Chromium/Blink engine, it's obviously open sourced. So there's a possibility to improve it. There is also Gecko and Trident/EdgeHTML, and Gecko can do a lot of customization that Chromium can't quite do. Chromium seems to be the problem with browsers being resource hogging and causing my laptop to get hot(I've got intel I5 4th gen, 6gb of DDR3 ram, 750gb SSD, an HP laptop). After playing with Edge and Waterfox lately, Edge heats up slightly but not so bad, while Waterfox doesn't heat up my laptop at all. Watching YouTube videos on Vivaldi heats up my laptop like crazy. So, I would love for a collaboration of improving the Chromium/Blink/Webkit engine. From what I hear, Vivaldi adopts that engine because it's the most future proof modern engine. It's being populated by other browsers faster than Gecko. I think for the open sourced nature of Blink/Chromium/Webkit and work on improving the engine, it could definitely have what others have and more. From what I also hear, some of the code on Chromium is old and not written very well, which is what causes the resource hogging and the heat issues. Would love for that to be improved on as well so Chromium is not only fast on high end hardware, but low end hardware as well(My laptop isn't really low-range at all though). I know you'll have an email client, which will be interesting to use, but how about also having an office client, file storage client, etc.? Continuously evolve the UI. Others made suggestions on the UI. Evolve it, think about the user, making things better and easier for the user to do without taking away the power and features of Vivaldi itself. Think of all users and how all your unique features caters to both power users and casual users alike. Honestly, the browser is fast and simple, which is what most browsers are trying to go for today. I wouldn't have known that this browser was "only" for power users, but I've never used the old Opera. I really think every person, from casual to hardcore, would enjoy this kind of browser. It's absolutely beautiful, much more so than Chrome, Firefox and Opera, so every user would want to try it out right there when they see it. It's fast and simple, and gives keyboard commands you can customize(with lots of commands at that), so I don't have to use a mouse/trackpad. It's speed comes from it's efficiency of navigation more than the browser speed itself, though the browser speed so far on the latest snapshot is very fast. Think with this, Vivaldi team: have all the features you used to have with Opera, and the features of other browsers, make it better, faster, all on a lightweight, lightning fast browser you seem to be having right now. This could be better than every other browser at everything a browser does, not just about having lots of features. Vivaldi seems to be much more interested in giving a great browser for the user rather than for the interests of it's organization. I'm thinking big with this browser, because I see a lot of potential in it. I think it could turn out to be really great. So what do you guys think? I would love for this thread to go deep into insight on Vivaldi as a browser itself and it's improvement of features and specs so it can match and beat other engines and browsers! And lets show the Vivaldi team what we think!
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So what do you guys think? I would love for this thread to go deep into insight on Vivaldi as a browser itself and it's improvement of features and specs so it can match and beat other engines and browsers! And lets show the Vivaldi team what we think!
I think people would be more likely to read your post properly if it wasn't so long.
I recommend reading some other threads or searching the forum. There's already a setting to remove the pixel at the edge of a maximised window. Bookmarklet support for thinks like Readability have already been requested.
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You asked for a lot, but you also went a little out of bounds with this, just saying. :pinch:
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Just for everyone else's reference, D0J0P initially posted these suggestions in the pinned thread for feature requests. However, some discussion was struck about his ideas, and he moved it to a new thread so as to keep the feature request thread OT.
Here's where he first posted it and, thus, where the discussion started. I will now quote my reply to that post here, as much of it is still relevant. I will also put it in a spoiler, because it is very long.
Hi, I'm new here.
Well, first of all, welcome to the community!
Secondly, wow. You posted so many great suggestions and gave such good feedback that I kinda wish you'd started your own thread instead of posting in this one. I know it's a sticky about feature requests, but I felt like I was reading a fairly good quality review on Vivaldi more than reading a users' requests. I agree with several things you said, would like to make some counter points to a few things, and give you some advice on customization that makes a couple of the things you covered completely possible already.
Being more compatible with popular websites(my friend gave me this suggestion).
Can you or your friend list some examples? Because the only thing that comes to my mind is Youtube. And that's really less of Vivaldi being incompatible with Youtube and more Google forcing html5 on the internet. Not that I'm against dropping Flash, but what happened when Google started really pushing html5 video playback instead of Flash playback on Youtube, several browsers were left out of the loop because they didn't have support for certain video codecs (specifically H.264). Which was brilliant from a business perspective, because that meant people were going to start using Chrome more just to watch Youtube videos.
There was, once, a time when you could opt out of using html5 on Youtube if you weren't using a browser that could support those codecs by going to this page on Youtube. That option no longer exists and that page now is only there to tell you that your browser doesn't support H.264, because Google.
Vivaldi doesn't currently support MSE and H.264 playback, so Youtube videos are going to be broken a lot of the time. It's almost definitely going to come to Vivaldi in the future as it develops and matures. But for now, I usually tell people to use this extension until Vivaldi supports H.264.
Being able to remove extension buttons set beside the search bar. I want the stock UI but without the uBlock Origin ad blocker button stuck there.
Ah, this is one of those customization things I mentioned that's already completely possible. Check out this thread where I covered the same question from another user. I'd normally also quote the relevant answer, but this post is already pretty long, and a quote would just use excess space.
Create flat UI background images for all popular sites like the Opera Speed Dial. And/Or create the url name with a colorful background if that's too much work.
This is another thing that's already completely possible. Check out this thread by An_dz where he explains in detail how to customize speed dial thumbnails.
Add things like an option to turn on hardware acceleration, Turbo mode, and a menu UI kind of like the one Firefox has. Or at least a new, smart way of implementing the menu, such as putting it in the panel, or having it turn into a pop up window like the settings or the quick commands. I don't know, the menu is nice, but don't change it for nothing.
I hate to admit it, but Vivaldi is based on the same engine as Google Chrome, so it has many of the settings that Chrome has - it's just harder to find them because there's no buttons to get to them.
Hardware acceleration:
- Put this in your address bar: vivaldi://settings/search#a
- Scroll down to "System"
- Tick "Use hardware acceleration when available"
Turbo:
This has been discussed before to the point where a dev started a thread about it recently. Most people seem to be weighing in that it's not really a feature that we need in our browser, but yeah, it would be nice to have. I'm going to assume a Turbo mode will be coming to Vivaldi soon enough.
"Smart" Menu:
Not everyone would like a more modern settings menu, and I'm one of those who like it pretty well the way it is. A settings panel is a pretty interesting idea, though. User choice on how the settings dialogue is displayed would be ideal.
Create a small scroll bar like Chrome/Chrome Canary has. You then have more screen real estate for the website and can hover your mouse over the scroll bar to make it normal sized.
This is one of those things that's already totally possible.
- Go to vivaldi://flags/#overlay-scrollbars
- Enable Overlay Scrollbars
Create a "Reader Mode" like what Edge and Safari have. It's awesome to be able to read articles with big text.
I put my reply to this statement in a spoiler because it's largely just me preaching about how I hate Microsoft and Apple. So, just skip that or read it, but I apologize in advance. I just couldn't stop myself.
! If I walked away from this thread without pointing out that Edge and Safari didn't do this first and are not the only browsers with this feature, it would bother me. I'd like to say Opera was the first browser with reading mode, but I can't. Mostly because I don't remember Opera having a reading mode, and I doubt very much that ChrOpera has a reading mode. I don't know which browser did it first, and that's not ultimately important to most people or to me. The only thing here important to me is pointing out that Microsoft and Apple only steal other people's ideas because I have to be that guy. I'm sorry.
! The first browser I ever used that had a reading mode was Maxthon Cloud Browser (edit: Actually, I think Maxthon was the second browser I ever used that had a reading mode. Sleipnir 4 (and previous versions) was the first. I could be wrong though, it's been awhile since I've used Sleipnir.) and I loved it. I loved everything about it. Not the browser, the reading mode. The browser itself was lacking so many features that Opera had and it was pretty buggy. I mean, I did love the browser, but I didn't love everything about it.
! Firefox implemented a reading mode a few months back (could be wrong on the time frame). There was some brief news about a reading mode coming to Chrome, but I don't know if anything happened with that because I firmly avoid using Chrome at near any cost. I'll end this tangent now.Have toggling the panels, status bar, menus, etc. all transition with smooth animations. Popping in, sliding out, something like that. Would make for a modern feeling browser.
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Speaking of animations and transitions, think of how you can use these in every action in Vivaldi that smoothly goes from one part of the browser to the other in a way that makes sense(like Material Design).
I'm okay with this, as long as the length of the animation can be adjusted - because if it's too long I will hate it, and so will a lot of other people. The faster a menu gets displayed, the faster you get to your content or finish your work. Smooth transitions can delay that process. That aside, you can sort of kind of already do this with some custom css. It's not ideal or perfect, but it's something until the devs add it for real. If they do.
It would be great to right click on a page and have a personalized click menu pop up like Edge has…
If I understand what you're talking about: I could rant more about how Microsoft didn't do this first, but I won't since I've done that probably too much already. I will say that this was a thing that the old Opera could do, and several people have asked for it to come to Vivaldi. I wholly support this feature request.
If I don't understand what you're talking about: Please ignore everything I just said in the above paragraph.
Another thing would be great is Vivaldi's own dictionary in the browser. It would be great to search up a word without having to "search" that word on Google.
I have no idea if it works in Vivaldi, but you could try out this extension.
Remove the door from the home button. That makes it more minimalistic and modern.
You could edit the image yourself and achieve this. I personally like the door, but I can see the appeal of removing it.Have a keyboard command to focus on the search bar beside the address bar.
This is a thing. I believe the default shortcuts are ctrl+k and ctrl+e
Fix some of the color UI errors on some websites. Some websites had a blue header at the top and Vivaldi turned red.
Vivaldi's adaptive colour scheme is determined by the dominant colour of the website's favicon. So, the favicon of that website must have been mostly red or non-existent.
Make the browser lighter, take up less CPU like it currently promises.
Because Vivaldi is based on Chromium, that might be pretty difficult for the devs to achieve. The Chromium browser engine is just a notorious, resource consuming piece of software that is really draining on the system. Particularly and probably most noticeably on older hardware. It's for this reason that many people wish the devs had chosen a different engine (and one of the countless reasons a lot of users left Opera when it picked up Chromium), but it's probably too late to change it now.
I know you'll have an email client, which will be interesting to use, but how about also having an office client, file storage client, etc.?
That's an interesting idea - but assuming by "file storage client" you mean a cloud service, that's going to take considerable server space on Vivaldi's end, and I just don't see it happening in the near future. I would love to see these added to Vivaldi's arsenal, though. Give it even more of an edge over other browsers.
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To close this post, I am going to enclose several things you said that I agree with and would like to eventually see added in a spoiler.
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@D0J0P:
! > The ability to use keyboard commands to move tabs left and right of the tab bar, so I don't have to use the mouse to do that.Pair that with being able to right click a tab for the option "close tabs to the right", and it would make it easier to close links I had opened temporarily.
Actually closing the edge of the tabs in a maximized and minimized window, both with the tabs set on top and on the bottom of the screen.
Being able to remove extension buttons set beside the search bar. I want the stock UI but without the uBlock Origin ad blocker button stuck there.
Improve the Speed Dial.
[…] Turbo mode […]
The option to have tabs stay the same size, and have you scroll through them instead like Firefox.
Create a "Reader Mode" […]
It would be great to right click on a page and have a personalized click menu pop up […]
Another thing would be great is Vivaldi's own dictionary in the browser. […]
Have the title of the website show on the menu bar for all websites.
An option to delay tab loading in background when you first open up the browser, like Firefox. I sometimes have multiple YouTube videos in different tabs and I wish I didn't have to stop each video after I open Vivaldi.
Basically come up with lots of keyboard commands to add to the list so we can set them and be much less dependent on the mouse/trackpad. I want to use the keyboard much more.
Make the browser lighter, take up less CPU like it currently promises.
I know you'll have an email client, which will be interesting to use, but how about also having an office client, file storage client, etc.?
[…] have all the features you used to have with Opera, and the features of other browsers, make it better, faster […] Vivaldi seems to be much more interested in giving a great browser for the user rather than for the interests of it's organization.
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Re: Cortana
I'm personally against having something like Cortana implemented, but I could very well be in the minority there. I value privacy, and things like Cortana (Windows 10 as a whole, really) and Ok Google are very well known tools that Microsoft and Google use for data mining. I assume, in fact, that I am in the minority, because if people were concerned with online privacy, they'd have boycotted Google a long time ago.
Re: Other browsers
If you're having trouble finding a browser that's good for you, I'd like to make a few suggestions, as I spent the better part of 2-3 years looking for a suitable replacement to Opera.
For just blazing fast speed, nothing beats Maxthon Nitro.
For looks over functionality, Sleipnir 6 is probably the best.
There's also Yandex Alpha which aims to remove clutter from the browsing experience so that users can focus on the web page. Disclaimer: Yandex Alpha may just be the standard Yandex browser now. I haven't been following it very closely.
For features (sometimes to the loss of a tiny bit of performance), nothing has been able to beat old versions of Opera (12.17 and earlier) yet.
Of course there's also Vivaldi, Otter, and Firefox - but two browsers that offer a lot of functionality but often get over looked are Maxthon Cloud Browser (made by the same people as Maxthon Nitro), and Sleipnir 4.
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Anyway, good feedback. I hope you find what you're looking for
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Being able to remove extension buttons set beside the search bar. I want the stock UI but without the uBlock Origin ad blocker button stuck there.
Paste this in the custom.css:
.extensions-wrapper { display: none !important; }