(History of) Vivaldi Feature Requests

stilgarwolf

So, let's begin
Vivaldi isn't slow and resource hogging because of blink, blink itself is pretty lightweight (not as presto but still) and everything depends on all the extra speedup flags like preloading etc AND frontend
Just compare chrome with chropera

Blink is lightweight? No way!
Compare memory used by Vivaldi (Blink), Mozilla and Otter (WebKit). For the same 5 open tabs, Vivaldi uses more than twice memory and virtual space than Otter and >50% more memory than Mozilla. And Otter is the fastest.

TalGarik

@stilgarwolf:

Blink is lightweight? No way!
Compare memory used by Vivaldi (Blink), Mozilla and Otter (WebKit). For the same 5 open tabs, Vivaldi uses more than twice memory and virtual space than Otter and >50% more memory than Mozilla. And Otter is the fastest.

It doesn't make much sense to me to compare stable browsers and pre-alpha ones.
Fastest stable browser I know - on linux - is SlimJet.

Tiamarth

@stilgarwolf:

@Tiamarth:

If that were true, I'd be so much happier with the state of browsers today. Unfortunately it's not true at all.

Chromodo

Comodo Dragon

Google Chrome Canary

Google Chrome

Opera

Slimjet

Vivaldi

Yandex

Yandex Alpha

Excepting Vivaldi and Opera (and maybe Yandex), all are just Chromium browsers plus some customizations.

And WebKit is another engine than Blink. And is much smaller and faster.

I looked up each of those browsers before posting that list to be sure that I wasn't giving any false information.

Comodo Dragon is based on the Chromium project and uses the Blink rendering engine. (And Chromodo is Comodo Dragon with a different logo and other, minor differences.)
Technically Chrome Canary is a pre-release version of Chrome, so I suppose I could have left that out. Chrome is the proprietary version of Chromium, and it uses the Blink rendering engine.
Opera is based loosely on code from the Chromium project and uses the Blink rendering engine.
Slimjet is based on Chromium and uses the Blink rendering engine.
Vivaldi uses the Blink rendering engine.
Yandex is based on Chromium and uses the Blink rendering engine.

I was previously unable to find any sources for Yandex Alpha's rendering engine, and still can't. However, I think it's probably a reliable assumption that it uses the same engine as its predecessor, which would be Blink.

Chromium is not a rendering engine. It's the open source variant of Google Chrome - it is a web browser. Often times, web browsers that use the WebKit or Blink rendering engines are also based on Chromium - and that's why browser devs can say their projects are based on Chromium. The thing is, Chromium itself uses the Blink rendering engine. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Blink is a fork of WebKit and it's generally a safe bet that if a developer says their browser is based on Chromium, that it uses the Blink rendering engine. Which is why I said, "If I were to include all of the browsers based on WebKit or advertised as 'based on Chromium' without specifying an engine, I'd have another 11 browsers to add to this list."

And, remember, a web browser that looks like Google Chrome or Chromium is not necessarily just Chromium with a few modifications. People often assume this is the case due to appearances, and sure, it often is - but it's not /always/ the case.

@TalGarik:

It doesn't make much sense to me to compare stable browsers and pre-alpha ones.
Fastest stable browser I know - on linux - is SlimJet.

Do the same thing with Google Chrome and any browser based on a different engine, you'll usually get the same result.

D0J0P

Alright, so I've been getting very interested in the differences between the browser engines.

I had written another post, but it was erased before I could send it.

From what I get, Gecko seems to be just as good as Webkit/Blink/Chromium?

And can the Chromium engine be improved upon to become as good or better than Gecko?

And is it true that Chromium based laptops slow down over time? Because I've used Chrome in the past, and it's slowed down over time. So far I don't recall Firefox doing that.

So far, I've started playing with Waterfox, a 64-bit version of Firefox, and it's much faster than Vivaldi and Firefox so far.

Using Vivaldi, it's starting to heat up my laptop. I've also installed the 64-bit version of Vivaldi, and while it's faster, there's still a lot of smoothing up of the browser needing done. I also wish the panel toggling would work with all websites, as I have the panel hidden and toggle it out when I want it.

How come you think Vivaldi didn't go with the Gecko engine if it's better than Webkit? It sounds like the Gecko engine is closer to what Presto was. And as you say, Gecko is just as fast and stable as Webkit.

I did install an add-on for Waterfox to customize the keyboard shortcuts, and it works okay, but it isn't the same as using keyboard shortcuts for Vivaldi. It's just so much better on Vivaldi. Though Firefox/Waterfox does have way more keyboard shortcuts, which I'd also like Vivaldi to take advantage of.

Ayespy

Jon never went into great detail as to how he and his team, after literally months of discussion, settled on Blink.

What we DO know is that the popularity of Gecko is actually declining. Further, although it initially starts out as fast as Blink or even faster with multiple tabs, it has memory leaks which cause it to slow down over time until it is consuming at least as much memory as Blink and is reacting slower.

Further, Blink is now better supported and more responsive to downstream feedback, plus it has built-in advantages over Gecko in being ported to mobile. It is essentially being developed in real time to serve desktop and mobile equally well.

This future-leaning posture of Blink is what Jon has cited as being one of his primary considerations as to which engine to adopt.

Tiamarth

@D0J0P:

From what I get, Gecko seems to be just as good as Webkit/Blink/Chromium?

And can the Chromium engine be improved upon to become as good or better than Gecko?

In most cases, on modern hardware, the user will never notice a difference between the Gecko and Blink rendering engines. Fact is, page loading times in most any browser you'll ever be able to find are so fast that it's basically imperceptible. And on most modern hardware, Blink is more efficient and more lightweight than Gecko. If I seem biased against Chromium and Chrome, it's because I am. So take anything I say that presents Chrome negatively with a grain of salt. Verify everything I say on the subject

I'll always recommend a Gecko browser over a Blink or WebKIt browser to a user on older hardware, because Gecko handles that environment better. And while Blink is arguably faster and more efficient than Gecko, it's very often less secure. Just the other day someone came to the forums and asked about a security issue they were concerned about, and it was a leak that was carried to Vivaldi from Chromium. Here's that thread.

But Blink's efficiency on modern hardware means nothing for people who never update their hardware because they just don't keep up with technology like you and I might expect they should. These people can feel the difference between Chrome and Firefox, and Blink just doesn't cut it.

@D0J0P:

And is it true that Chromium based laptops slow down over time? Because I've used Chrome in the past, and it's slowed down over time. So far I don't recall Firefox doing that.

If you mean Chrome books, I have no idea. I've never used a Chrome book before. If you mean the browser, then yes. But if you install extensions frequently or use a lot of extensions, the same can be said about any browser - including Firefox. In my experience, Gecko browsers have been more stable and faster than Chromium browsers - but I'm just one use case. There are lots of people who've had the opposite experience.

@D0J0P:

Using Vivaldi, it's starting to heat up my laptop.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. People with less capable hardware will have a bad experience with Blink every time. I've yet to find an exception to this.

@D0J0P:

How come you think Vivaldi didn't go with the Gecko engine if it's better than Webkit? It sounds like the Gecko engine is closer to what Presto was. And as you say, Gecko is just as fast and stable as Webkit.

I don't know why the chose Blink - maybe because that's where browsers as a whole are headed. Maybe it's because Blink is seen as more modern. I don't know. But the bottom line is, Vivaldi's rendering engine is not going to stop me from using Vivaldi and enjoying it. I missed Opera, and Vivaldi aims to continue Opera's legacy. As long as it keeps with the path it's on, I'll continue using it.

sgunhouse

As far as it goes, they did say that at the time Chromium/Webkit (it didn't become Blink until later) was the better choice. Though I do have to say, Firefox for Android currently feels better than Opera on the same hardware - though that hasn't been around for very long yet. Unfortunately Firefox for Linux gets stuck with an ancient version of Flash if you have sites that require it, and that won't change.

Knox

So glad I finally found this browser, Chopera really wasn't cutting it.

I have a couple of feature requests that are inspired by the old opera, or by current Vivaldi features. Feel free to take these ideas and discuss them and make them your own:

Mobile Emulation. This was in the old Opera and was for debugging, but I used it more for restricting websites to only a narrow strip of my screen. For example if you try to reduce a window containing Youtube or Wikipedia to a 640px wide strip content is cut off and horizontal scrolling is required. Turning on mobile emulation in the dev tools solves this by loading the mobile version. It'd be great if this was one of the "Page Actions" and shrank the portion of the window being used for rendering the page to a strip like the old Opera version used to. Also IMO this is how pages in the sidebar should be loaded so as to reduce horizontal scrolling.

Turbo. I used this as much for bypassing proxies as I used it for loading pages faster. For example sites blocked in the UK can be accessed using Opera Turbo, also some workplaces block webmail or ebay but Turbo loads the pages. Modern browsers have extensions like Hola to achieve the same but having it as a native feature is more trustworthy IMO.

Load as…: Used to be required to load some pages that were only IE compatible, nowadays it's usually pages that "require" Chrome, for example several webGL based sites like Here.com up until recently.

The coloured tabs are great, it's a pity they don't remain coloured when inactive. I think it would be more intuitive and faster to be able to think of the open tabs by colour rather than name, especially as my eyesight fades.

The "Obscure" Page Action is great. It should be domain specific. E.g. I would always like to obscure Gmail, as well as most, if not all the sites I visit that require a login, just to stop workmates glance-reading my private communications.

Tiling is good for comparing pages and keeping things tidy, I would also like to use it as a tabswitching alternative. ctrl+0 to show all the tabs in the current window as tiles, ctrl+0 again to go back to the previous view, or ctrl+[number] to go to a different tab as the old Opera used to do.

Tiamarth

@sgunhouse:

Unfortunately Firefox for Linux gets stuck with an ancient version of Flash if you have sites that require it, and that won't change.

This is very true. I should have mentioned that earlier. I suppose we could use an alternative, but there's no guarantee one would even work correctly in all the places we'd need it to. There's also always the Fresh Player project - which is an effort to get PPAPI working in Firefox via a wrapper. I haven't felt like I needed to use it yet, but it's something I've been keeping an eye on. If you want, here's some information from Web Upd8 (the article is targeted to Ubuntu users, so you may need to adjust for your distro (I'm presently running Linux Lite, which is based on Ubuntu, so it would likely work for me)) on how to install Fresh Player.

@Knox:

The coloured tabs are great, it's a pity they don't remain coloured when inactive. I think it would be more intuitive and faster to be able to think of the open tabs by colour rather than name, especially as my eyesight fades.

I remember this being brought up on the forums before and I think I remember someone managing to get Vivaldi to behave like this using some custom CSS - but after searching the forums for a couple of minutes, I didn't turn anything up. It's possible that it happened somewhere in the UI customization thread, but I'm not positive about that.

Anyway, if you're more determined than me to look for anything about this in the forums, you can search them here.

Duxuforest

I would like the ability to scroll through my tabs quickly. At the moment it seems like the tab scrolling is purposely slowed down to be more accurate, but I'd like every scroll "step" on my mouse to result in a tab switch regardless of how fast I'm going.

I'm sure that some people want the tab scrolling to stay the way it is now, so it would be great if it could be an option.

XavierCLL

Hi

Please add in settings the option for set default zoom level (for new sites), without this and need to set for each new site the zoom level, this is very frustrating and this doing Vivalvi unuseful for me, and this is the only missing feature for migrate to Vivaldi!!!

Thanks

mossman

@Tiamarth:

@mossman:

they introduced a presentation mode - where a few tweaks in the HTML meant that your lengthy online document could be reduced into a pithy slideshow complete with bullet points to replace all the paragraphs of explanation…

The two closest things I could find to a "presentation mode" and a "book style" were fullscreen and kiosk mode. It's possible I overlooked the relevant settings, but I was simply unable to find them.

The thing you overlooked was that I said you need to tweak the HTML of the page…

It's about making verbose webpages that can be changed into presentation slideshows when you go into full-screen mode - you had to add some stuff like this to the style data:

@media projection {
			.screen {
				display:none;
				}
			.projection {
				display: block;
				margin-top: 1.5em;
				page-break-after: always;

then separate content that you only wanted displayed on the slideshow and content you wanted to display on the webpage version:


## Abstract

*   Attempt to find better formula

## Abstract

This thesis covers work carried out as part of an attempt to find a more comprehensive and accurate formula for defining the flexibility of fasteners in metal aircraft joints. It is a continuation of earlier literature research undertaken to assess the different ways in which this parameter is defined and applied by various companies and institutions.
[… blah blah blah...]

I just went looking through the back-up of my old website and sure enough it *still* works in O12!  :woohoo:

D0J0P

Hey Tiamarth!

Sorry it took a while for me to get back to you and create a thread, but I finally created one! I included everything I said, with an emphasis on the browser itself, it's features and specs and the Chromium/Webkit/Blink engine.

So check it out!

rkzn

Always show the delete cross on the top right corner of Speed Dial thumbs. Yes, I have just accidentally deleted a folder when I meant to open it because I clicked the place where the cross appeared out of nowhere. :oops: (no problem, i recovered the backup, still…) :blink: Or in some way avoid a 1-click deletion, e.g. confirm the deletion.

In general, allow using the Speed dial as if it was the bookmarks manager. I guess the one main thing missing is the possibility to drag a thumb/link in to or out of a folder.

karthikeyan.moopanar

Opening related tabs next to each other is definitely a priority on my list. Currently, opening a link in a new tab opens it as the last tab. So, there's a bit of inconvenience.

Knox

Thanks Tiamarth, the UI Customisation thread has some good info, I might have a go at custom theme when I have more free time, however the more I think about it the less I like the coloured tabs anyway as they blur the line between what is part of the browser and what is part of the webpage. There already exists two methods of identifying the wanted tab by colour: the favicon and the thumbnail and since several colours in the tab UI are used for special features (e.g. the green for secure sites) additional colours don't do anything other than look cool.

Tiamarth

@mossman

Ah, sorry. No idea how I missed that in your post. But, in my defence, I do believe I apologized in advance for that post because I had typed it shortly after waking up :lol:

Anyway, even though we've both acknowledged it was possible to make Opera's User Mode behave like a reading mode, I don't know that I'd be willing to give Opera the credit of being the first browser to implement reading mode. Because, by default, it's not a reading mode.

@D0J0P

I've replied to the new thread and so have a couple other people.

@Knox

No worries. I agree with you, I don't use the coloured tabs unless I'm showing off Vivaldi to someone new. I tend to prefer the default theme without page colours and some minor custom modifications to the layout of the GUI.

Sten_pl

I like more and more Vivaldi browser, if just the tab stacking was the same as in Opera 12, because the present one is not convenient or practical for me. I am still using O 12 precisely because I have a dozen ore more pages open and it is all stacked in few groups, so when you want to work with one group you “open” it and when you finish with it just “close” it and move on to the next one.
The advantage of this solution is that you have ability to see titles of all the cards in the open group, so I have a better orientation. in contrast, the current solution in Vivaldi forces continually check what is on the each card in the group (can't see all tabs titles at once) …
I hope for restoration of work on 2 or more tabs side by side in one window.
Very useful future of Opera 12 !

Best Regards for team !!!

Doomer

@Sten_pl:

I hope for restoration of work on 2 or more tabs side by side in one window.

It's already here http://i.imgur.com/ndRUUmC.png. Just select more than one tab (with shift or ctrl) and right click on it. The option should be there.

Sten_pl

Thanks for info, but what about resizing of viewed tabs ?
With this I could move almost immediately from O12 to Vivaldi.
Now i just miss Opera 12 tab stacking - I mean winding and unwinding of a group of tabs and bookmarks with sorting by folders/links a-z (it doesn't work properly jet).