Vivaldi seems to have finally won me over
 

I have spoken here before about my love of Opera and how I used it from 2004-2017 before leaving it for Chromium. Now, I know they are not the same thing, but there are similarities in the staff base between Opera and Vivaldi, as far as I'm aware.

I always felt that Vivaldi as a browser was great but not 'quite there'. However, this latest version, 2.1.1337.51, seems to have tipped things over the line. The main thing is not only the functionality, which is great, but the appearance. Vivaldi gives the user so many options and so much control, but the new 'Window Background Image' option is a masterstroke - well done to whoever thought of that. The browser now looks beautiful.

I think this comes at a good time since I didn't like what had happened to Chromium after version 69: I was still using 68 and refusing to update. This now gives me a reason to move over and, to an extent, back.

So thank you ruario, and thanks to the Vivaldi team. You're doing a sterling job.

Thanks for your assessment, I'll have to give it another shot.

So far, so good. I have to enlarge the font next.

Set to minimum of 16. My older eyes can see this easier. Or, I need to buy a bigger monitor.... :)

I'm delighted with it. Panel on the left, tabs on the right. Maximum vertical screen estate, and the only layout that makes sense on a widescreen, 1920x1200 monitor. When will LibreOffice, Gnome, Firefox, Chrome and friends catch up? Accessibility shortcuts second to none, and many other features unique to the old Opera slowly making their way back.

vivaldi has become my main web browser now (version used: 2.1.1337.36_1).
However, there are still some issues such as quite often not being able
to play some videos (youtube, etc.).
In those cases I use ungoogled-chromium, which never fail.

Thanks Lysander666 and Gerard. I passed on your messages to the team!

Those videos almost certainly are MP4 files using H.264 and AAC. Try this page and see which videos play. Not being able to bundle support for H.264/AAC is not a technical issue, it is purely a patent/licensing issue.

That said, you can fix this for yourself:

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/htm...edia-on-linux/

P.S. The URL to this help page is printed on terminal if you start Vivaldi (stable) without proprietary media support, or in snapshot versions the command to fetch a suitable file is given directly.

The binaries you use are most likely built with proprietary media support built in, which may or may not be legally sound depending on where they are distributed from and/or if the person or organisation distributing them is covered by the relevant patent laws surrounding H.264 and AAC. If they are covered by these laws, you probably want confirmation that they paid for the correct (and in the case of AAC in particularly, very expensive) licenses. But IANAL and I am not really familiar with ungoogled-chromium, so you would need to do your own investigation to be sure.

On a different note I had a look at their download site. If you are using one of their hosted binaries, pay attention to this warning:

IMHO that is quite scary because you have no idea if they have been altered. In the case of using binaries from a company like Slackware, Vivaldi or even individuals like AlienBOB it works because over time these organisations and people have built up a level of trust in their respective communities but taking a binary that could have been built by "anyone" sounds very high risk to me. Make sure you know who the person is and furthermore make sure you feel confident that you trust them.

Tried it recently, liked it because it can load dependencies from /opt/vivaldi/lib/ (for example I can put libgtk-3.so.0 there without having to install it system-wide)
Interface is ok, probably better than chrome IMO. I'd use it full-time if only it could support userchrome.css and usercontent.css (which chromium can't do).

Well it is not really supported (for now) but plenty of users do customise the UI

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/1062...customisations

Yes I know about UI skins, but usercontent.css is something else. It's about painting websites, not UI. Skinning web content.
Sad story really, because chromium use to support it long time ago, and then chrome devs disabled it for "security" of users who were apparently "infected" by simple css file.
So yeah, if I want to paint a website according to my spec, I get "protected'" from my own css file now, and can't do it anymore in chromium engine.
Palemoon can load content stylesheets, I think new firefox can too but I haven't checked for a long time.

Perhaps, someone can ease my paranoia and explain how Vivaldi remembers what links I've visited on a page AFTER I've DELETED everything (the history, cookies, cleared the cache, etc.) but the save passwords ?

Looks like ruario attempted to answer this, but cwizard, you pointed out that his answer did not cover all your use cases.

Maybe someone [and/or ruario] could look into it and elaborate on this issue a little more.

I guess I wasn't clear when I wrote the post to which he replied, but when I clear cache, cookies, etc., I also always clear the history. Just part of the "whole" process. So, when I wrote that, clearing the history had already been done. I always clear everything, but the saved passwords. I pointed the out in my reply three posts later.
I notice in Vivaldi there is NOT an option for clearing "site preferences." Would that have something to do with it?
If it is remembering links the user has clicked on, it is storing browsing history somewhere and not deleting it when instructed to do so.

It would be good if the browser gave the option to have different styles/colours of icon for the panel [there is already this option for the menu bar: you have the 'burger', the red Vivaldi icon or a mono one]. However, you can only have a red one for the panel.

For now, if you want a different style/colour icon for the panel, you have to create one manually. The normal icon is in /opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/resources and is called icon_16.png, so you'd have to replace that and give your new icon the same name.

I simply cannot reproduce that at all, neither can my colleagues. You are selecting “For all time”, right? Also on what site(s) are you doing this? And have you compared with Chromium?

This is how I am clearing data (see attached image)

What is exactly how I have it set up.
The problem is most noticeable on distrowatch.com due to the numerous links on that page, but I see it on other sites, Amazon.com comes to mind.

Where can i get the newest version? sbopkg has the 2.0.1309.37 which i installed and like very much.

Voilà.

Thanks a bunch.

Does it phone home and all that data collecting crap?!!!

There are various responses to this, but the short answer is - no, it does not collect data. It does contact Google, but only to:

a] update certain certificates
b] update Widevine
c] update the safe browsing blacklist [this can be turned off].

This question has been asked a number of times, as you can imagine.

From one of the devs:

Slightly longer answer from the Vivaldi team:

Even longer answer:

Read the privacy policy. Here's an excerpt:


This is the only way I'm getting to Iceland any time soon, unfortunately.

ACL/Whitelist (more effective than safebrowsing nanny list)
It's maintaining a standard sqlite database (could just mount RAM where it expects a profile, and clear on reboot)

Here is a video from a clean install in a VM, with distrowatch. It works fine for me.

Do you have any extensions installed or something else that might be messing this up for you?

I just want to clarify this. On Linux in the current stable version we do not fetch Widevine automatically using the Chromium components update mechanism. This is something that only happens on Windows and Mac. However as of the recent Linux snapshots we have started auto-fetching Widevine, but it still isn't using the Chromium components update mechanism. Instead it is done in a shell script (that I wrote), which is called by the post install scripts of the deb and rpm. It is only called on installation or upgrade (or uninstall to clear the file). The Vivaldi repack script I make (and the SlackBuild on SBo) are not currently running this script or doing any equivalent, so nobody here gets automatic Widevine.

P.S. If you want to see what the widevine update steps involve, download the latest vivaldi snapshot build (.deb or .rpm) unpack it and take a look at “/opt/vivaldi-snapshot/update-widevine”.

EDIT: Short summary, “https://dl.google.com/widevine-cdm/$WIDEVINE_VERSION-linux-$WIDEVINE_ARCH.zip” is fetched ( “$WIDEVINE_VERSION” and “$WIDEVINE_ARCH” are hardcoded in the script itself) and unpacked locally. A sha256sum (also hardcoded in the script) is then used to confirm that the lib inside is the exact version we expect and if so, it is moved into a location where we can find it (“/var/opt/vivaldi-snapshot”). The pre-uninstall scripts of the .deb and .rpm packages will remove this file (if present) just before the package manger removes all the files that were installed normally (thus leaving the system clean on uninstall).

I should also add that if you do run the snapshot version of Vivaldi, you could actually call the bundled update script yourself to fetch and install Widevine for you:

Or to remove it

P.S. Root access is only needed because it places the lib in “/var/opt/vivaldi-snapshot”.

As a side note, here is a story on how I announced the automatic widevine fetching and how I did not test it properly! :p

The SBo script allows to customize the user interface using the
/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/custom.css file if built with CUSTOM_CSS=yes.
For web pages I use the Stylus extension.

Thanks, I will look into that custom.css seems equivalent of userchrome.css

This extension is too heavy, I see on github what it is, a fork of extension (stylish) that was already fat years ago.
I don't think it's gotten any smaller. What I'd prefer is just few lines of css, not a huge package manager thing with hundreds of features.

There are other extensions, for example User JavaScript and CSS.

Thank you Lysander666 for an interesting thread. It seems quite a few people have at least some concerns with where a number of mainstream browsers are going and Vivaldi may qualify as a great substitute. However before I install yet another web browser I'd like to ask you why you left Opera for Chromium and when? What was the last version of Opera you used? I'm asking this because I recently installed Opera 57.1 and was pretty much "knocked out" with it's balance of Features and Simple Quality, especially in handling multimedia. Basically I'd like to hear a comparison of current Opera and current Vivaldi. I may just go ahead and do that myself but it would be nice to hear from someone with more background experience with Opera.

You're right, there's a list of these things, which explains a lot.
Liked this one for example (it's MIT)
I'll look into that, and a few others, but I'd still prefer browser feature rather than extension.

Really in order to go into why I personally moved on one has to go back a bit. I can't remember what the first version of Opera I used was, but it would have been something like 7.4 or 7.5, around mid 2004. As you can imagine it was a very different browser then and used a different engine. ruario would surely be a better Opera-historian than I, but I think it was around version 13 that a lot of big changes happened: Opera changed engine and started following Google, which led to an exodus of developers. This is partly why Vivaldi was created - to be like Opera was around version 12. Another reason why it was so special was that Opera was a hotbed of innovation back in the day [or an "innovation factory" as one friend put it]: they came up with some great ideas which other browsers adopted - the most important being browser tabs, which was an Opera implementation.

I think I left Opera at version 45, when they started integrating Facebook and Whatsapp into the sidebar. That was really it for me. Another reason was that I was having problems with video and audio playback on some sites via Linux, and Chromium solved all these instantly for me. For instance, for the life of me I couldn't get audio playback with Opera in Bandcamp and it drove me mad to have to switch browsers for it. I wanted to do everything in one browser without moving over, and Chromium allowed me to do that.

I can't really compare Opera 57 with Vivaldi since it's been over a year since I used Opera, and I can't really remember now what it was like to use. All I can say is that media playback is great in Vivaldi, customisation is second to none and the browser looks fantastic. It's also good to use a browser which still has old Opera at its heart. If I were you I would try it out. There are fewer privacy concerns too - as far as I'm aware, Opera is now owned by a Chinese company [again, someone else could confirm] which is why a lot of people half-jokingly refer to Opera as "Chinese botnet" - apparently it phones home a lot to China and sends data over there.

I can't verify the Chinese connection though, I haven't looked into it, so please take it with a pinch of salt. But one thing is for sure - Opera now is very different to what it once was, probably in a similar way to how Nokia now is nothing like Nokia used to be - in terms of ownership, functionality and ethics.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...ra_web_browser

Here you go, a little Opera history, as of ten years ago.

http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blo...d-opportunity/

I loved Opera up to and including 12.16, which I still install and use from time to time.

DAMMIT! lol... now I have to try Vivaldi :D

Compared to the other browsers of the day, Opera (up to version 12.16) was brilliant. I even paid something like 29 euro for the ad-free version. (Version 4 or thereabouts?) Small extras like the right-click menus that made it a pleasure to browse. And the accessibility features, like one-key shortcuts, were second to none. About 15 years ago I introduced it to a customer with very restricted mobility, and she was over the moon. Browsing the internet became so much more pleasurable for her. Then along came Chrome and Firefox, with their dumbed-down interface and accessibility-as-an-afterthought.

Eventually Opera succumbed, and replaced its Presto engine with Google's - not sure if it was Chromium or Blink, but it was so limited it came as a complete shock to those of us who had been using Opera for at least a decade. It was impossible to take on the might of Google and Mozilla, and most people never knew the difference between the Google browser and the Google search engine anyway. Why would they care about Opera? Yes, Vivaldi has also had to incorporate the Chromium engine, and there's no going back to the past, but it is clear that the Vivaldi team respects users, and strives to give them a browser that allows THEM to decide what kind of interface they want, unlike Google and Mozilla, who impose their interface on users whether they like it or not. And no, extensions of varying quality, extensions which might not be around tomorrow, do not compensate for their lack of browser customisation.

In a nutshell what I resent most about Chrome and Firefox is the insulting way Google and Mozilla decide on our behalf what is good for us. The Vivaldi team, on the other hand, are taking user input on board. To me that is 90% of the appeal, and the main reason I unreservedly applaud them, and use their browser.

I was using Opera in my NT4 days along with Netscape. Tabs were so ingenious. With tabs I soon left Netscape behind. One great feature of Opera was the link context menu that supported BOTH "Open Link in New Tab" and "Open Link in Background Tab." I love this feature because I never can predict if I want to read now as part of the thinking process of the current tab or read later.

With Firefox I always had to use add-ons to provide that simple feature. Sadly the Quantum version does not yet have a functional API to support context menu modifications. And I still don't use the Quantum version on my systems.

So my simple question: does Vivaldi support these same two simple link context menu options? Methinks "probably" based on this page screenshot.

One hopeful sign about the browser is the web site does not use overlays. Perhaps the developers have half a clue about design. :D

P.S. Don't tell me to middle-click. Ain't gonna happen. ;)

Well, poo. I read the replies but my response still remains the same: I am not knowingly connecting to Google. :(

That still provides geographical data against those not using a VPN. :(

Like their insulting I’ll be careful, I promise! dialog. ;)

That all said I should place Vivaldi on my short list of potential Firefox replacements. :)

On the recommendation of the OP, I used the SlackBuild for vivaldi and tested it out. OMG, what a difference to Firefox!

For a long time, I've had issues with Firefox hogging ungodly amounts of RAM in a very short period of time, and becoming sluggish/unresponsive. With Vivaldi, however, everything is much faster, and silky-smooth. The features are something that only people who like browsing the web their way would put into it.

I'm going to use Vivaldi as my daily web browser for awhile, see how it performs on a day-to-day basis. Things are looking promising, however. ;)

Thanks Lysander666 and Ruario!

Finally a good Firefox alternative. Lastpass integration, Tidal support and tabs on the side without plugin; Vivaldi will be my daily browser!

Cheers, Leon.

Update - It's in and I like it!

Got rid of it after few days of testing. Interface's cool, didn't like the engine.

Has it moved beyond 1337.51? The main page still says it's that one.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/

How does one set Vivaldi as default browser? The option in Vivaldi's settings does not seem to work for me.

Is it possible that it's somehow being overridden by your DE? Which do you use?

EDIT: I don't know if this helps at all:

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3115...doesn-t-work/8

Failing that, go all out:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chan...w=1920&bih=979

From the same page:
so yes (there's been an update) and no (it is still the same stable version).
I do not know if the update has been included in the sources when you download them now.

Looks like ruario's scripts notifies you if there's nothing new to download:

I didn't check to see if Ruario's script specified "latest" or a specific version. I just wanted a glimpse at first so what I have, and like so far, is vivaldi-stable-2.1.1337.51-x86_64-1ro

I am using i3 as a window manager, no DE. In firefox clicking the 'set as default...' always worked, but not so in Vivaldi. But the following (from your Vivaldi forum link) did the trick:
Cheers, Leon.

I installed Vivaldi on my laptop. It has an amazing interface, however I somehow dislike the behaviour of the address and search fields. Will play with the settings a bit more...

Out of interest, what do you mean when you say behaviour? The one thing that I find a little odd is the progress bar when loading a page. Chromium has a dial that spins when it's trying to connect and when it's loading [I think in Chromium, the dial spins anticlockwise when it's trying to connect and clockwise when it's loading]. When Vivaldi is trying to connect the progress bar just hangs and everything is at a standstill. It would be great if the progress bar pulsed rather than did nothing before the page loads.

when i start typing in the address field, it would display some really weird suggestions, like something i have bookmarked long time ago, but have not visited recently.