back to article Feature-rich Vivaldi rolls out, offering power users a choice

Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner’s plan to recreate Opera reaches a major milestone today. The Vivaldi browser is out of beta after more than a year. Wrapped around the Chromium engine, Vivaldi offers power users classic Opera browser features such as tab stacks and shortcuts, and even throws in an IMAP mail client (coming soon …

  1. chivo243 Silver badge
    Headmaster

    One more time?

    I tried Vivaldi a few months ago, seemed ok, but importing bookmarks was odd to say the least...

    Just like the new layout here on El Reg.

  2. Ketlan
    Happy

    Notes though not email

    '...and notepad too'

    Is this the old Notes facility? This was fabulously useful and is sorely missed in Firefox. Couldn't care less about the email though - I have a text-based email client to take care of that.

    1. Adair Silver badge

      Re: Notes though not email

      It may not be a direct replacement, but I find the list.it plugin for Firefox extremely useful. It sets up editable and savable notes in a side-pane.

  3. Rimpel
    Thumb Up

    I've been using this as my primary browser for a few weeks now. It fixes my main annoyances with Chrome - decent bookmarks, tab activation is in MRU order, & uses a normal size font in the address bar(!). All my add ons I was using work too. Oh and contrary to the article you can assign shortcuts to search engines, there is a Nickname field when adding a new search engine and the defaults already have shortcuts. The rewind feature is really handy too.

  4. CAPS LOCK

    It may have some way to go but at least it continues for where Opera 12 left off...

    ...which was the best browser until recently.

    1. Aoyagi Aichou
      Windows

      Re: It may have some way to go but at least it continues for where Opera 12 left off...

      For me there still are plenty of reasons to continue using O12.

      Dragonfly, the neat :config, :cpu and :plugins windows, M2, tab stacking works better, deletes new cookies on exit, etc...

  5. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Hmm. Guess I'll have to do some sort of Vivaldi vs Brave trial next weekend.

  6. Ronole

    Terms of Service

    Hmm.

    I took a look at the Terms of Service, and noticed item 3:

    "We may, if needed, change any part of these terms of use without notice, and your continued use of the Software or Services will be deemed as acceptance of such changes. You should check the terms of use regularly!"

    I do not like these terms, not one bit.

    Considering that Vivaldi is giving away the browser for free, how do they intend to make money?

    (Am I the customer or the product?)

    I tried to locate the current Terms of Service on the Vivaldi website, but I couldn't find them anywhere. How exactly do I determine what rights Vivaldi is currently claiming regarding spying on my web browsing?

  7. Chewi
    Thumb Up

    Held out on Old Opera for a while, eventually went to New Opera when it arrived on Linux, got fed up with it after a few months, tried Vivaldi and breathed a huge sigh of relief. It's not for everyone but it suits me perfectly.

  8. NanoMeter

    With some further tweaking

    I guess they will be able to outfox Firefox. Vivaldi already looks good.

  9. alain williams Silver badge

    Been using for a bit

    as a secondary browser. Can be nice to have something different when debugging web pages (javascript). I also use it as a browser where I regularly trash all remembered data (cookies, etc) when I can't be bothered working out what I need to enable with adblocker, etc, to see some site.

    I can't understand why they want to put an IMAP client in it .... it is a web browser; please stop the bloat!

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: Been using for a bit

      The email client in propert Opera was deployed as a DLL, so entirely optional rather than bloat. It was also rather good. I always found it entirely natural to have my email available to me inside the web browser, and that was before webmail became a commonplace. There was an RSS feed, torrent client and newsgroup reader too. And it was still smaller than the competition.

      -A.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Been using for a bit

      I still use the standalone Opera Mail client and can't wait to have something like it in Vivaldi. Automatic recognition of mailing lists, incredibly fast text search. Definitely the best mail client I've ever worked with.

  10. Wil Palen

    just great

    Have been using Vivaldi for a few months now. It's very fast and it has never crashed on me the last 3 beta releases. I really enjoy the UI color following the color scheme of the visited site!

    Some gripes;

    F11/Fullscreen - from here I cannot seem to reach the menu or tabs

    Save Open Tabs as Session - This includes all tabs from all windows in a session. I'd rather see this implemented as saving all tabs in a single window.

  11. Unep Eurobats
    Paris Hilton

    Been using it for a while

    In tandem with Firefox. I like it, but I don't see a lot of difference between them, nor Chrome from my occasional experiences. Maybe I'm just not enough of a power user.

  12. TimR

    and notepad too

    Basic notepad functionality in any browser:

    data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

    in address bar

    courtesy of http://lifehacker.com/5980134/turn-any-browser-window-into-a-quick-edit-notepad

    1. cd

      Re: and notepad too

      Unless one is running Noscript.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Great

    It's been my default browser for a few weeks. Having been an Opera user of old, it's fantastic to have a proper speed dial back (one where I put sites where I want, not some horrible 'frecency' algorithm annoyance), proper mouse gestures and vertical tabs.

    It's still a bit buggy and I'll really appreciate it when they get sync working (and mail too), but it's been really nice already.

  14. Spender

    Yet another webkit/bink browser?

    Meh. Without some care, in few years time we'll be looking at webkit/blink/chromium dominance and wondering where all the competition went.

  15. petef

    Opera can use Chrome extensions too

    The Download Chrome Extension extension allows access to the Chrome store from Opera.

  16. mocadedhed

    Real Browser Innovation?

    While we're on the topic of browsers ... Can any of you browser power users comment on Ethereum Mist? Seems like a truly innovative browser going beyond delivering a cleaner interface and speed - but instead a whole different layer of interaction. Thoughts about its viability and potential impact? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgNjs_WaFSc

  17. Jim-234

    I've been using it as my daily work browser for a long time & I really like it. The lack of native Flash support is excellent!

    The only 2 main things for me are:

    No way to easily export your bookmarks

    I'd like them to honestly / clearly just say how they plan to make money. The browser is good enough that I'd pay for it, but my guess is there is some other revenue idea, which is fine, but I'd like to clearly know.

  18. ChubbyBehemoth

    Hmm,.. they seem to have done something nasty to China. I get to some cyber squatter instead. Cloudflare asking me for filling in a Captcha, which doesn't load in China, leaving a blank DIV. Or it is just that Vivaldi doesn't want the Chinese user to give access to their website and asked those kindly people from cloudflare to kcuf up the connections?

    Yo Reg,.. what's the story here? Is it the reds or the blues to blame?

  19. This post has been deleted by its author

  20. CaptSmegHead
    Happy

    Very Nice

    Following reading this article I have been using it all morning. Very impressed so far with the speed at which it renders webpages. So presumably all bugs in Chrome will also exist in vivaldi given their shared code?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon