Vivaldi UI slower than Chr MS Edge
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When will Vivaldi have an UI as fast as (Chromium) Microsoft Edge?
Not a rant but a honest question.
I have tried Edge for the past month (whole of April) and coming back to Vivaldi now, every UI action feels slower.
Opening a new tab, closing a tab, detaching a tab into a new window, reordering tabs in the same window, zooming with the touchpad (when zoom level is not changed, but the content gets bigger) , scrolling (vertical or horizontal) with the touchpad, the right click menu in a page, the startup time, the "reflow" when zooming in % via
Ctrl +
andCtrl -
. I really feel like everything is slower in the Vivaldi UI.And this makes me sad, because I would like to use Vivaldi and not have to use Edge or Chrome. But Vivaldi is this much slower. Visibly slower.
If important, my specs are i7-9750h, 2TB ssd, 32 GB ram (java dev machine).
Does Vivaldi team have a plan to improve performance, or is the current level considered "Good Enough"?
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ModEdit: Title
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@TheBestPessimist
Hi, I am testing Edge on Linux at moment but I cant see any difference in performance.
If there are some it is in 1/10 of a second range.
As Vivaldi use it´s own UI on top of the Chromium UI it cant be faster than Edge/Chrome but it come close.
What is really slower on Windows is a cold start of Vivaldi, therefor a new window start slower, too.
Some settings can slowdown Vivaldi.
Use animation < vivaldi://settings/appearance/
Huge list of downloads
Save history forever
10 thousends of bookmarks.
Check: https://vivaldi.com/blog/how-we-made-vivaldi-faster-independent-of-chromium/
The developer still work on performance of Vivaldi as all developer do with there software.I will test Edge/Vivaldi again on one of my Windows installs.
Cheers, mib
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This probably doesn't affect all the things you mentioned, but a large part in Vivaldi's UI being slower is the fact that Vivaldi has built its own UI layer on top of Chromium. Meanwhile Chrome and Edge use Chromium's built-in UI (although slightly modified). Because Vivaldi has an additional layer (based on web technologies) it adds some extra work for the computer and is therefore slower.
It's a trade-off. Vivaldi's UI can never be as fast as Chrome and Edge, but Chrome and Edge can never be as customisable as Vivaldi.
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Thanks for the answers but I'm not convinced that using web technologies for the UI (HTML, CSS, JS) works as an excuse.
As far as I remember Firefox is also replacing the XUL (an XML-style config) part of UI (which afaiu is everything UI-related) with web technologies, and Firefox's UI (not talking about the page, just UI) is very fast as well. You can test this right now using the dev preview, where the UI is named Proton (and is imo very ugly, but that's a personal opinion -- maybe after a few days i could get used to it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
).Also, I'd like to present this from the perspective of my family (father/mother): when I installed Vivaldi on their i3 laptop and asked them to use it, they asked after a few days why do they need to use this slow program? They like Microsoft better because it is fast.
What is really slower on Windows is a cold start of Vivaldi, therefor a new window start slower, too.
A new window should not start slower though (when splitting a tab from a window to a new window). Everything in the old window/tab already exists, all the assets should already be cached. Computing some IDs needed for keeping track of the new window and its tabs should take a very short time as well.
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On my Mac, I always feet than Vivaldi was less responsive than others browsers (Safari, Chrome, Opera, …), then I bought a M1 Mac, Vivaldi was still much slower than others browsers until they released the M1-Optimised version.
And now, it is very hard to see a difference of responsiveness of Vivaldi compare to others browsers. They are all very quick and responsive.
This message is not directly linked to this subject which is not Mac related, but I just wanted to say: On M1 Mac, Vivaldi is amazingly fast. As fast as a native browser.
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You'll stay longer at a Sushi bar than at McDonald's.
It feels slower, but Sushi bar are comfortable. -
@TheBestPessimist said in When will Vivaldi have an UI as fast as (Chromium) Microsoft Edge?:
Not a rant but a honest question.
"?Wow , i really wanted to make the same post but not about Edge , about the new Opera , even the new Opera that made from Chromium is faster than Vivaldi , even new opera have many built in APIs like whatsapp and messenger but it still faster than V.
However that , i prefer using Vivaldi , i feel more safe with V and V is made by the real old Opera developers .
i really hope from V to see what wrong with V and why other based Chromium is faster than V . -
My two cents, which is probably all it's worth, lol....
Chrome is SUPER slow for me, and always has been. In fact, when I do need to run it, my entire computer slows down and lags and stuff.
Firefox is much better, and I use it often for Web design purposes (excellent adherence to the standards), but it still isn't what I like in browser performance.
Everyone's computer is different, and browsers behave differently on yours and mine.
With Vivaldi I've had mixed experiences with speed, but nothing like the days of 28.8k modems and telephone line internet. If you never experienced that, you dodged a big bullet, lol.
Vivaldi is my main browser, not because of speed, but because of the excellent privacy, security, and ability to customize it to my taste. I have yet to find any other browser that meets those three needs as well as V.
Today's climate of instant gratification is what makes people want more and more speed, and really, what's a few seconds? What possibly could be so urgent about anything online that a few seconds matters that much?
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Re. @Eggcorn
If you've used Vivaldi a lot more then Edge, Edge is probably going to be faster then Vivaldi.
That's not the case. i straight up copied the profile from vivaldi to edge, so that I have same passwords, same bookmarks, all history and addons. it worked, and i could simply resume my work. You could say Edge is having to work more to adapt Vivaldi profile to its own and doing an extremely good job (as they're all chrome underneath).
Even with a fresh Vivaldi install (always portable for me), it is still slower than edge/chrome.
In the end, I think your point is moot.
But Pessimist, try some of those steps before you dismiss Vivaldi as a slow browser.
I have used Vivaldi for more than 2 years at this point. It's not that i am dismissing Vivaldi, I am making a statement from the perspective of a pretty old user at this point.
Re. @JoelYoung
Today's climate of instant gratification is what makes people want more and more speed, and really, what's a few seconds? What possibly could be so urgent about anything online that a few seconds matters that much?
Thank you for your input, however I do have a counter argument:
As a developer, I would argue it's the same reason I (and many other people) like to give their money to JetBrains for IntelliJ IDEA, and not use the free Eclipse as their main IDE. Even though they are both good IDEs, Intellij is better, faster and more polished. And those extra hundreds of milliseconds that I don't have to wait for a particular menu to appear do make an impression since i do those actions tens if not hundreds of times a day.
On a totally different train of thought: IntelliJ IDEA is made using Java and Swing, and I can honestly say it moves faster than Vivaldi. And it uses Swing... which is by no means a performant UI toolkit. This is another reason why I believe the "HTML, CSS, JS" is a poor excuse for Vivaldi's performance. The Vivaldi UI runs in another chrome instance, so you can consider it as "just another webpage". Web page performance is really good, so I don't see why UI performance cannot be.
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I feel the same way. Regardless of the machine, Chrome (and the new Edge) feel snappier. It used to be the case with my old machine (i7-5820K + 16 GiB RAM), it holds true with my current (Ryzen 9 5900X + 32 GiB RAM) - on each of these Vivaldi's UI feels a tad slower than Chrome's.
Can anyone offer insight on Vivaldi's architecture, i.e. is the fact that the UI uses HTML + JavaScript + CSS the actual reason for the slight performance hit? If this is the case, perhaps something like WASM can be used to leverage the flexibility of web technologies and yet have close to native code performance? I haven't dug really deep into that, so I might be wrong in my concepts (feel free to correct me).
It might be possible to profile Vivaldi's UI performance, but since the same can't be done for Chrome (at least not in the same way), it would be an apples to oranges comparison, so it would only make some sense if you're comparing different Vivaldi versions.
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@TheBestPessimist It is slow. It will never be as fast as Chrome. It could be much faster if Vivaldi would make that their main priority.
Do note, do you have any extensions in Vivaldi that are not in Edge?
The history can slow down Vivaldi. Try disabling history past 30 days. I am also working on a mod to clear up history from search engines as well as very similar entries.
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@killchain said in When will Vivaldi have an UI as fast as (Chromium) Microsoft Edge?:
perhaps something like WASM can be used to leverage the flexibility of web technologies and yet have close to native code performance
No! First of all, WASM is not for UI, it is for things like cryptography, which could be transferred to JavaScript. For certain tasks like that, like the adblocker, Vivaldi can and does use C++. Perhaps Rust could be used as well?
The answer to Vivaldi’s speed problems is probably continuous optimizations, better communication between parts, removing unnecessary transitions, blocking unnecessary resources, etc.
One thing I have considered is positioning the start page behind everything instead of rerendering it every time. I will go make a feature request.
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@killchain The main thing is that Vivaldi's UI does not (can not, and still entertain the kinds of modifications Vivaldi users demand) use native elements. It is a whole new written-from-scratch UI layer in addition to the existing (patched) Chromium code. The Chromium UI is not used at all.
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@ moderator, I believe my initial discussion has derailed into a "help me fix my performance problems".
Could those posts be moved to their own topic please, so that my initial topic remains on track?
(if needed, i can provide a list of the posts which i believe to be off-topic) -
@code3 said in When will Vivaldi have an UI as fast as (Chromium) Microsoft Edge?:
@TheBestPessimist It is slow. It will never be as fast as Chrome. It could be much faster if Vivaldi would make that their main priority.
Do note, do you have any extensions in Vivaldi that are not in Edge?
The history can slow down Vivaldi. Try disabling history past 30 days. I am also working on a mod to clear up history from search engines as well as very similar entries.
As I said above, I copied my Vivaldi profile directly to Edge, so all plugins and all history and all bookmarks, and all passwords and all tabs and all profiles were copied to Edge, which handled them gracefully.
As for history: I want all of my history remembered. In Firefox I have about 7 years worth of history and it doesn't have issues searching through recent history while older than 1 year seems to take a few more seconds to search, but it's still searched.
If Vivaldi tries to load all history every time I open a new tab or split a tab to a window, that is abad ideabug and it should bechangedfixed.However, even with a fresh profile (so no bookmarks, history, logins, plugins, passwords) the Vivaldi UI is slower than Edge with my imported Vivaldi data (2 year old user) or Firefox.
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@TheBestPessimist Forking a topic is a great deal of labor, especially having to sort out relevant and irrelevant comments. I'll do it if you insist (it'll take me about a half hour so I'll have to do it tomorrow) but really, there's nothing wrong with how this topic developed.
Developers are not going to read here and answer your question, as there is no answer to it. Instead, what there is, is a bunch of opinion and ideas, and other users have offered these.
One of the themes of user feedback in this topic is that, with the resources your machine has, the "slowness" of Vivaldi should actually be, though not non-existent, undetectable to human senses, pretty much. The fact that it appears to make such a strong impression on you is taken as a sign by others who use the product as a possible indicator that there is something non-optimum about your setup vis-a-vis Vivaldi. Perhaps this is not a concept that should be pooh-poohed.
To test this idea, I put up Edge and Vivaldi side by side just now, and ran them through the same commands. On my box, which is not as well-heeled as yours, my perception was that Edge was fractionally, fractionally slower than Vivaldi. This makes me ask why your experience would be so different - and wonder if Vivaldi's awful, awful slowness is a unirversal thing. Just sayin.'
Of course I am using a Vivaldi "nightly," so to speak, so that might have something to do with it. It might also presage greater speed in your future.
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@TheBestPessimist Long story short, Vivaldi is always trying to improve performance. There are no target dates for any kinds of benchmarks.
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@TheBestPessimist said in When will Vivaldi have an UI as fast as (Chromium) Microsoft Edge?:
Even with a fresh Vivaldi install (always portable for me), it is still slower than edge/chrome.
Oh. Well in that case, I don't have high hopes that there's much you can do to fix this. Might be worth trying some of the steps in this article. But as I said, use whatever browser works for you.
You might want to try Opera, I think Opera's big focus is on speed. It's no Vivaldi, but it does have a lot more features and customizability then the average browser. Firefox might be worth a shot too (it's also above average in features and customizability).
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@Ayespy I tried a browser benchmark test called Speedomter.
- Vivaldi = 85.8
- Edge = 110
Perhaps there are other tests, but this one shows a significant difference between Edge and Vivaldi.
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Just to quickly add my £0.02 to the conversation...
My Windows computer (well, dual-boot) is the one on my desk at work. It was built maybe 2 or so years ago, but the spec is still pretty decent - water-cooled, overclocked i7-8700k CPU (and hell, does that thing overclock!!!), decent SSDs and 32GB of decent-quality RAM.
My personal computers at home are a bit more modest, with the oldest of them being a 13-year old 32-bit Intel Atom netbook with 2GB RAM and a budget SSD in it. Additionally, I only run the netbook at its slowest (800MHz) CPU speed so that I can get longer battery life and not stress it too much with lots of heat.
If anything about Vivaldi was slow, the slowness would therefore be severely amplified on my netbook.
Except that it isn't: The user-interface of Vivaldi (e.g. menus, opening/closing tabs) feels just as quick on that machine as Edge is on my work computer.
Last time I actually booted Windows on my more modern laptop (still pretty old but 64-bit with W10 and Devuan), Vivaldi's responsiveness simply blew Edge out of the water. Maybe that's because I don't allow Edge to start with Windows and stay resident in the background (which is the default setting). But even that would only affect initial startup, so I really can't see why anyone could ever possibly think Edge was more responsive. I can't test if it's improved as I no longer use Windows - I even only boot it at work to update it.
Am I missing something? Why do so many people think that Vivaldi is slow? Or at least slower than any other browser? I just don't understand. If I open a new tab, it's there instantly. If I open a menu, it's there instantly. When browsing on my 13 year old netbook, the only indicator that it's a very old computer is in the actual rendering of web pages, but that's because ads, scripts and spyware cruft have got so bloated in recent years. With a Pi-Hole and all the content-blocking up to the max, even that's only a slight delay on it.
When that blog-post came out about how much faster Vivaldi was, I actually was rather puzzled. I don't even know how you'd measure such things. It wouldn't be percievable to a regular human on any computer I've tried, and you'd definitely not be able to use a stop-watch. All I can assume is you screencast UI interaction to a video, and play it back in slow-mo. That way you could perhaps see a couple of ms was shaved-off the time to open a tab, which you could then market as an amazing "50% faster". But it's still fast to begin with.
Not trying to argue and not denying some people think Vivaldi is slow - but I simply can't reproduce the problem on any computer I've ever tried. Perhaps user-profiles get mangled and broken over time, and mine never has? After all, I do just start with a fresh profile whenever I change distro or upgrade to a later edition of a non rolling-release. If you do find V slow, perhaps delete your profile, start afresh, and keep watching-out for whatever setting or extension you add that causes the problem?