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back to article At last! Vivaldi lets you kill looping GIFs

The web browser for power users, Vivaldi, has gained a Reader mode and some accessibility features, but one new feature stands out. The reaction GIF may be one of the wonders of the 21st Century, but what if you don’t want your CPU cycles sucked dry by hilarious and ironic animated images? Turning off GIF animations can now be …

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  1. David Knapman

    They didn't do a "version number reset". They follow a long standing convention that, just because something is composed of digits and dots, that doesn't necessarily mean that its a decimal number.

    1.10 properly comes after 1.9 and is not the same as 1.1

    (What really irritates me is when people apply this logic even when the version number contains multiple dots, somehow embracing a convention that multiple dots are allowed and all but the first is ignored, which is not a rule with decimal numbers that I was ever taught)

    35 0 Reply
    1. JLV
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      http://semver.org/ it's a thing and it makes sense even if it doesn't seem intuitive at first. And you should really know of it in this line of work because it's commonly used nowadays.

      6 0 Reply
      1. VinceH
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        Coat

        I'm thinking of switching to a dash as a version number separator - but then you'll get people thinking version 2-1 is actually version 1.

        4 0 Reply
  2. Matthew Smith

    The website address is actually https://vivaldi.com/. The link on the page is for the forum.

    9 0 Reply
  3. Lee D Silver badge

    Cool.

    Tell me when - after several years of development now - they do anything other than occasionally plug a tiny old Opera feature into Chromium and push it out as a Chrome-wrapper. Because this is seriously 15-year-old options put into modern-Chromium AND NOTHING ELSE.

    Drives me insane, given the number of other 15-year-old Opera options (including autoplay-video-disabling) that still are nowhere to be seen, that there's nothing else to differentiate it as a browser still, and that - again - all the promised "other" features (that Opera also had) are still completely absent.

    Either do something different, or just tell me to install Chrome, ffs.

    P.S. Right-click, Animated GIF was a checkbox option on Opera 9, 10, 11, 12 and maybe more.

    13 3 Reply
    1. Lee D Silver badge
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      P.S. third time the changelog has contained "different application icons" as a feature. But yet you still can't drag-and-drop bookmarks outside the bookmark manager sidebar app. Which means you bookmark onto the bar, and then have to go into the manager and move it into the subfolder you wanted it in in the first place.

      3 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Yet to use a wildcard proxy exception somehow evaded Opera for most of it's life.

      I presume now it's another me too Chromium browser it can do it. I can't be bothered to check any more.

      0 0 Reply
    3. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      While the Vivaldi team do seem to focus on lots of next door's low-hanging fruit, they do deserve praise for sticking at it and for the investors for showing the faith. It is still missing some stuff we took for granted with Opera but they are keeping up to date with security patches.

      The ominous silence over the promised mail client is what worries me most.

      11 0 Reply
      1. flokie
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        I never used the mail/news/bittorrent clients much - but outside of these there's still some Opera features that I miss.

        Maybe I'm crazy but I liked "ask me each time" when encountering new cookies - prompting a pop-up with site-level settings and i'd usually set primary: allow, or session-only, and third party:block or session-only. And I miss the wonderful right-click "Block content" option. So for all the sites I visited regularly settings were saved, but whenever I went somewhere new I could really customise things to my liking, and enable/disable what I wanted. None of the defaults in modern browsers allow me to do that so easily.

        Having said that, I agree with the general sentiment of your post.

        Vivaldi also manages things I didn't think were possible with the Chrome engine, such as tiling tabs, and brings new features we didn't have with old Opera (and usually executes them well too) such as screen capture.

        So yes, as much as I'd have liked to see the Presto engine moving forward, I'm grateful the Vivaldi team are delivering such a good browser.

        To the previous poster - what are you using then? Other than Vivaldi, I still use Firefox, but it's certainly not improving. I don't see Pale Moon as a viable alternative - new websites won't support it just as they won't support Opera 12.* . Edge? Chrome?

        11 0 Reply
        1. Updraft102
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          Websites won't support Pale Moon or Opera?

          Who asked them anyway?

          0 0 Reply
        2. Grifter
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          >>Maybe I'm crazy but I liked "ask me each time"

          So much this, I used to turn on cookies and go to a specific site and get all those cookies set up in place, and then afterwards disable all cookies, no new cookies come in, but the old cookies work fine and let's me be logged in to particular sites. In Vivaldi, even if you save cookies for a site, turning them off in the settings disables even existing ones, no site remembers you while disabled.

          As for blocking content, there something similar while being entirely different, at the bottom right you have the icon that looks like "< >", this contains a filter called content blocker which kinda-sorta works like old opera (at least for the annoying ads etc).

          0 0 Reply
  4. Bangem

    I might have missunderstood....

    ...but I always welcome the opportunity to be sucked dry!

    1 0 Reply
  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    "they evade ad blockers"

    They don't evade NoScript.

    Nothing evades NoScript.

    13 0 Reply
  6. Mike Flugennock

    I tried Vivaldi once...

    ...but its lack of ad/Flash/JavaScript blockers made it a non-starter for me.

    2 9 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      Re: I tried Vivaldi once...

      That hasn't been a problem for at least a year: extensions can simply be installed from the webstore. I have Ghostery and Signal running all the time.

      17 1 Reply
    2. Len Goddard
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      Re: I tried Vivaldi once...

      uBlock origin works fine.

      If you don't like something in an early release it is worth checking back before you slag the product off.

      16 0 Reply
    3. Shadow Systems
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      Re: I tried Vivaldi once...

      I realized I prefer Bach.

      =-)p

      *Runs away before someone throws something*

      9 0 Reply
    4. Updraft102
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      Re: I tried Vivaldi once...

      I could not get the UI to a point that I require with Vivaldi. It may be the most customizable out of the box, but it's nothing compared to Firefox + Tab Mix Plus + Custom Theme Restorer. I don't know what the future holds with Mozilla's upcoming suicide at the end of this year, but I won't be upgrading to a XUL-free Firefox unless it offers me all of the options my XUL addons used to by itself. Not holding my breath!

      0 0 Reply
  7. Mike Flugennock

    And also, as I recall...

    ...Firefox and SeaMonkey (I use both) also have options for the number of times -- down to zero -- looping GIFs are allowed to run.

    Also, the Flash-blocking extensions for SeaMonkey and Firefox pretty much take care of the auto-playing media issue for me.

    6 0 Reply
    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
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      Re: And also, as I recall...

      Firefox let you hit Esc to stop gifs, but Mozilla got rid of it because of the usual crappy easons.

      6 0 Reply
  8. Alan Sharkey

    Well, I happen to like Vivaldi - it supports a bookmark list like IE11 and Firefox - which Chrome doesn't (easily).

    5 0 Reply
  9. jake Silver badge

    WTF is a "reaction GIF"?

    Don't bother answering, it's obviously outside my demographic. Probably better that way.

    9 4 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: WTF is a "reaction GIF"?

      I suspect it's the Millennials discovering animated gifs from 30 years ago and thinking they invented them. Technically speaking, an animated gif is a Millennial in terms of its age, so it's only right they claim them for their own.

      1 0 Reply
  10. nickx89

    how's the browser?

    I just got aware of this browser by reading the article. Can anyone tell me how's the browser is compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera? I use opera mainly for adblock & VPN.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Slions
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      Re: how's the browser?

      I'm using it as my main browser with Firefox now being my second choice.

      I like the vertical tab bar which I use in Firefox too.

      Last I checked Chrome did not offer vertical tab bar and no plug-in would do a good job at it either.

      I usually have around 200 tabs opened and it copes well with that.

      Not using any adblock or VPN.

      It still has some quirks though, like some unfortunate default shortcuts, which you can fix yourself thankfully, or the fact that you can't disable middle mouse button auto-scroll but I guess those are only issues from the point of view of a Thinkpad Trackpoint user.

      Being able to customise tab double click actions and stuff like that would be nice too. I did try to get those issues addressed through the forums, without luck so far.

      4 0 Reply
      1. PhilipN Silver badge
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        200 tabs

        OK I believe you but I am curious to know how you remember* what you have open and how you find the exact one you need. And of course the ones which excite your loyalty.

        * I can remember about three. Any advance on 200? This sounds more and more like a challenge.

        2 0 Reply
        1. Slions
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          Re: 200 tabs

          On my screen the vertical tab bar fits 36 tabs per screen and right now I have 5 screens worth of tabs so I'm getting close to 200 already and that's on a new Windows 10 installation from 10 days ago.

          I usually try to keep tabs from a same web site or topic grouped together so I can easily switch between them as needed. Sometimes I do loose a tab or two but eyeballing tab icons and titles quickly finds them again. I mostly rely on tab icons when scrolling through 200 tabs.

          I'm not using Vilvadi Tab Stack but it's been a while since I gave it a try.

          Vivaldi tab preview is sometimes useful to check if that's indeed the tab you are looking for.

          At some point I decide it's time to get things back under control and sort through them closing the ones I don't need anymore before going on another tab opening rampage.

          Don't ask, I like it messy.

          0 0 Reply
    2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: how's the browser?

      It's the work of a few ex-Opera guys, but the initial expectation that it would be a modernised Opera 12 sadly wasn't borne out by reality.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Not That Andrew
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        Re: how's the browser?

        It's far closer to a modernised Opera than the browser called Opera these days, though.

        3 1 Reply
      2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: how's the browser?

        Oh and another thing; even though there's an example image in the article of the console being used to toggle the mute status of a tab...

        ...it still seems to allow a tab to be muted only while that tab is playing a sound. Thus, certain events that you may want to mute on an individual tab level, such as hangouts notifications in gmail, can't effectively be muted without simply muting Vivaldi itself in the Windows sound control. So that still isn't really fixed.

        0 0 Reply
  11. Mr Templedene

    Vivaldi on Linux looks great, and I'd choose it over any other browser except for two things

    1. Very slow to switch between tabs, I mean "did I really click that" slow (counted off 3 seconds just now)

    2. No H.264/MP4 video playback

    And yes, that is with the latest version, downloaded yesterday.

    Can't speak for how it works on Windows

    0 1 Reply
    1. Jordan Davenport
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      I haven't tried in a few months, but I know in Ubuntu, all it used to take to enable h.264 playback in Vivaldi was installing chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra.

      0 0 Reply
  12. Tannin

    Still no single tab-close button! Drives me spare.

    Other than that, it is good, and getting gooder. I now use it more than most other browsers. Pale Moon has dropped off the radar because of its lack of support for CSS Grid, Firefox has finally stopped messing up the UI with stupid dumb-as-Chrome changes every 10 minutes, and old-school Sea Monkey, appropriately, never changes at all. Still miss Opera though.

    1 0 Reply

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