Absolutely infuriating speed-dial UI behavior
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Hello.
I use the internet to research and source a lot of information as I'm sure many of us do. Surely, like others; my browser acts as a virtual library-hall - with massive 'isles' and 'bookshelves' of bookmarks from things I've found and would like to read, reread, reference, or revisit - all vastly ranging in importance from trivial, novel, or important. For me at least, all of that needs some categorical organization, and bookmarks/folders function as a primary feature to consider as a solution offered by browsers, in various degrees of quality and ease of use. This is likely a pretty typical browser use-case for many people, and is a primary area for what makes a browser worth using to them, myself included.
So, that-said; I am incredibly annoyed by the UI behavior of speed dial, which is like the front door to my 'library' analogy. It needs to be improved. Currently, Vivaldi is being a little pest - standing in the way every time I try to pass through the 'doorframe,' following me throughout the inner 'foyer,' and pulling things off the 'shelves' as I try to curate or organize them.
Primarily, the way that bookmark and folder organization in speed dial behaves is incredibly frustrating and causes an infinite mess of chaotic displacement of whatever organization is applied to them, where movement of one bookmark or folder 'entity' causes movement of surrounding entities, across, between, or elsewhere throughout other rows.
In detail - whenever one 'entity' is moved from one row to another - for whatever reason and seemingly at random - erroneous entities, ranging in quantity from one to entire rows nearby, will follow the dragged entity to the new targeted row, shift illogically, refuse to move as you'd expect, or an entity on the target row-line will decide to swap with the row you're moving from. There's no real cue to indicate when any of this is going to occur, and even if there was, who would want this ???
Further annoyance is in the manual UI fluidity itself. The action of dragging folders is slow and lags (no, it's not my hardware). Then, the action of trying to drag and drop an 'entity' into another folder is barely recognized within a hair-line area - otherwise the target folder will simply think you're trying to move it over and it will slide out from your cursor in such an annoying manner that it's almost comical - like it's sentient and trying to be difficult to catch. Then, if a folder ends up at the bottom of a list of bookmark entities within a folder, it is incredibly tedious to get it back up to the top; the upper edge of the window does not cause the page to scroll to the top while you are dragging any entity, which means you have to drag up within the limited window space, stop, scroll a little bit, grab and drag again... on and on.
There isn't simply a way to organize the view while within the speed dial like, lets say, something ubiquitous and integral that we are ALL use to - a file browser/manager window, with simple options such as 'view by' or 'prioritize by,' for example; 'as a list,' 'as tiles,' or 'folders first' (still in the way you organized them) or 'folders first' then optionally; 'organize alphabetically,' which would then, logically, rearrange the manual organization - But at least there would be a discernable, logical reason consciously chosen by the user.
As far as I've seen there are not options nor a settings section to disable or customize these ill-contemplated UI behavior 'features' to make speed dial's bookmark and folder organization behave exactly the way any user would want it to - mostly to never rearrange manual organization unless specified, especially not by moving whole swathes of rows into a jumbled mess without a logical or discernable system.
It seems like whoever designed the speed dial UI was trying to emulate the skeuomorphic behavior of iOS app UI organization and behavior. Many dislike skeuomorphism because of the way it can actually cause inefficient or even ironically, unfriendly UI - and that interface, to this day, and across all apple devices which use that app and folder UI, fights against the user in similar ways as the speed dial does, but at least it doesn't randomly rearrange everything whenever something is moved !
One last comparatively minor annoyance is that bookmarks will often unload their icon-previews which results in a folder or list of bookmarks that loses it's previous meaning and can make them much more difficult to navigate - as the visual ques give a quick indication of what sort of 'isle' or 'bookshelf' it might be, besides the folder's title. I recognize this is more of QOL complaint and not high on a priority list, but I would like for Vivaldi to offer me an option to ALWAYS reload ALL bookmark icon page-previews, regardless of whether Vivaldi thinks this is a good idea or not and regardless of whatever hardware or bandwidth requirements it might require. If this is already a feature, then it doesn't work consistently and needs improvement.
These things are what I consider to be the focal points of a browser I hope that they are improved!
/overdue & long-pent rant over. Ty; coming to my TED talk
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@chtodg The trouble with long rants with use of CAPS LOCK is that it makes the points you are trying to make obscure.
Sorry, but unless you can follow the Code of Conduct, I have no time to help you.
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@chtodg
Hi, it´s mostly not a good idea to post the first time with a bock of text and shouting in a forum.
I have only a few hundreds bookmarks in speed dials and folders, I know some user have ten thousands of them.
Anyway, speed dials don´t rearranged randomly and there is absolute no lag to move them.
I guess you have a lot of tabs open, this slows down Vivaldi at some point. I test this with about 300 tabs playing two 4k videos on to windows. Then it starts lagging on my system with 16 GB RAM, specs in my signature.
What cause Vivaldi really to lag are extensions and third party security software.
To exclude extensions and settings open a guest profile, close the other window and test again.https://help.vivaldi.com/article/guest-view/
Cheers, mib
EDIT: @Pesala he was faster.
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Deleting your own post was the best thing to do, to be frank.
Come back again when you have matured, and have some worthwhile suggestions to improve the Speed Dial aka the Start Page (most feature requests have probably been made already).
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@Pesala No, I still stand by my points and the sentiment behind them. The points are clearly made and sectioned by paragraphs, and I still think they're worth making. I removed temporarily to edit for better readability. It is transparently a rant. You don't have to comment to it if you find it distasteful, right? I'm not ashamed to express my emotion about a topic.
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@mib2berlin In my case folders tend to lag when dragged. This is without tabs open or heavy resource usage. It might be due to the amount within the folders perhaps? It seems to occur with most folders for me, but again my hardware really isn't limited. My speed dial does seem to rearrange at random. Tiles will shift and move between rows in groups ahead of what is moved or swap with a tile, seemingly at random and inconsistently. I just want them to never move unless I manually attempt to do so. Or have more options like I mentioned, such as list by, or categorize by - folders first: manually, or alphabetically - for example.
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@chtodg
OK, you can disable moving of speed dials by drag and drop in settings > startpage and manage your bookmarks in the bookmark panel. This is the bookmark control center more or less, I call it so, to move, sort it or add and delete.
The behave what you describe about lagging and randomly moving is not normal.
I work with speed dials in Vivaldi for several years now and this never happen for me on different hardware and on Linux and Windows.
Something on your system cause this, it is not the hardware, I guess it is an extension a cleaning software or a security software.
You can quickly test the first one in a guest profile, the second and third are a bit harder to test but sometimes simply disabling third party software show you what happen.
It doesn't matter if this works with Chrome, Edge or Firefox. It often doesn't work with Vivaldi.Cheers, mib
