When Opera switched from Presto to Webkit/Blink in 2013 it lost a lot of functionality and distinctive features like the built-in mail client and the side bar. Since then it has regained few of these features and it seems unlikely that it will do so in the future. Now the original creators of Opera are back with the Chromium-based browser Vivaldi. Vivaldi aims to be a browser for power users and the first technical preview already contains many features from Opera 12, as well as new ones such as traffic-, and memory-profiling for web-pages.
Related Stories
Version 1.0 of Vivaldi, a spiritual successor to the Opera web browser, has been released. The browser uses the Webkit/Blink layout engine also used by Google Chrome and current versions of Opera, but adds back in certain Opera 12 features and customizability for power users.
Vivaldi runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and is freeware but not open source software. The browser is compatible with existing Google Chrome add-ons.
Previously: Original Opera Founders Back with New Browser: Vivaldi
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:04AM
Sounds great. However, I wonder if it has equivalents (either built-in functionality or extensions) to the following important Firefox plugins:
Oh, and the most important: Does it run on Linux? (The fact that Chromium does doesn't mean Vivaldi does; Mozilla/Firefox supports Linux too, and yet not all Mozilla-derived browsers do)
I can't check on the Vivaldi preview page itself because I only get a sort of waiting indicator.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:19AM
I too get a waiting spinner. I decided to allow scripts, and found out that they support...
I'll give it a go, but as you said, unless they allow the above list of plugins, it's a no go.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:26AM
...and it's gone. Uninstalled as quick as it was installed.
A bright red border on everything is not good when it can't be changed to match your desktop theme.
No plugins, menu options for functionality that doesn't exist yet, no thanks
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kell on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:05PM
In fairness, that border appears to be associated with the colour of the web page you're on. I found that when I navigated away from Soylent, the red border changed to a neutral gray. Also also, they are pretty clear it's a "tech demo", so I'll give them some slack on nice extras like custom colour coordination, at least until they've got a stable first release.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:42AM
Automatic page reload every x seconds
Why this was removed from Opera I will never understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:50PM
Opera originally had scripting/plugin/etc control on a per site basis, so to some extent NoScript functionality was always present in their browsers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @08:27AM
No. It does run on Ubuntu and RedHat (64bit only), like all corporate "we support Linux, but only if you bought it from a big corporation, none of that freedom of choice or open source stuff".
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:32AM
It should be emphasized a bit more that "the original creators of Opera" are *not* the same people that gutted Opera in favor of a barebones Chrome clone. I used Opera for a few years, and even reading 2-3 summaries, I assumed that this was just the crappy barebones junk I abandoned it over.
That said, the current incarnation of "Vivaldi" doesn't appeal to me as a power user:
-- based on Chromium (if I loved Chrome/Chromium, I'd use one of its many clones)
-- designed around a social network (rather than having a network arise from it)
-- no extensions
-- no mail/news client
-- no bookmarks bar
Hopefully if I look into it in 6-12 months (if it lives that long) it will have grown up enough to be really useful.
If I'm really lucky, it will offer a realistic alternative to SeaMonkey, which I'm starting to really worry about thanks to the minimalist asshats on the Firefox team ripping out code as "useless" still in use by SeaMonkey. (I recently had to roll back the latest version because the RSS/Atom reader had been broken. Hopefully it's not permanent like losing profile sync or the Venkman debugger...)
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:37AM
It does, though they only provide 64 bit debs and rpms for Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora, respectively. The Fedora rpm requires a recent version of libstdc++, which means that it doesn't run on older Red Hat systems, e.g., Centos 6.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:39AM
I'm glad to see that Opera is now essentially a rebadged Google derivative. Soon all browsers will essentially be reskinned versions of Google products. Maybe they are already.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:52AM
Maybe they are already.
Then let me answer that for you: no, they're not. Firefox uses Gecko. IE uses Trident.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @12:02PM
Hahaha, as if IE is a viable alternative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:49PM
...and as if Mozilla's wholesale adoption of Google's technology (V8 engine anyone?) and acceptance of G's funds haven't influenced them in any way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:06PM
Mozilla doesn't use V8. In fact, their control over their own Javascript engine is one of the major things separating them from Google because it means they can support asm.js which Google is not in favor of (they like [p]NaCl).
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:01PM
Choice of poisons still leads to getting poisoned.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:16PM
That, and Mozilla was (until recently) heavily funded by Google. You don't think Google's fingerprints are all over it?
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:26PM
Is Yahoo gonna have all its fingerprints over the next iteration of FF?
subicular junctures
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:45PM
Yes, to the extent they're able. If I were a Yahoo! stockholder, that's exactly what I'd want to see. Why else?
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:23PM
I bet yahoo needs Firefox more than Firefox needs Yahoo
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:42PM
IE11 is actually pretty good. There are some interface things that annoy me, but IE is no longer the laughing-stock that it once was.
(Posted from Firefox on Windows.)
(Score: 2) by arslan on Friday January 30 2015, @01:31AM
Pretty good compare to previous incarnation of IE... but still lacking compared to FF and Chrome. The dev console is much much improved.. again compare to previous IEs, but still not up to par compared to the other 2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:22PM
It is unless you're an ideologically motivated freetard.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:55AM
If you're going to announce a new browser for power-users, at least test your website on Firefox with NoScript.
(Score: 1) by idetuxs on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:08PM
+1 Insightful. Main webpage doesn't work without Javascript (and a request to cloudfare.com), sorry folks, that's not only lame but unbelievable.
Plus, as mentioned in another comment, no addons? I need NoScript, Self-destruct cookies, RequestPolicy, RefControl, some Agent Spoofer and Adblock. At least something that replicates those functionalities. [I read it has adblocking bult in]
They are on the Alpha release. So after releasing their source code I will try it.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:37PM
As to Opera while I miss the old Opera I am thinking of 3.62. Best dang'd browser ever made, aside from being closed-source and all the limitations that brings. Still worth installing wine or a win98 vm just to have it available at times though.
I used to download new releases regularly and try them out but after that they became more and more like firefox - without actually having access to the firefox extensions - just not an attractive product anymore for me.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:40PM
Presto-powered ('real') Opera is available natively on Linux, no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @06:57AM
Yeah. If you're a promiscuous JavaScript user you can get the power user Vivaldi experience right here https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]
And since it's proprietary I don't think too many smart people are too interested...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gallondr00nk on Thursday January 29 2015, @12:32PM
That the current Opera team won't open source Presto is a massive disappointment. I can appreciate the old devs trying to make a good browser (at a time when we barely seem to have any choice at all - webkit or gecko), but Opera isn't the same without it, and any derivative won't be as good as Opera 12.
I just wish the current Opera team would either open source Presto or patch it up a little.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:52PM
Not having any experience with Presto, what's so good about it?
(Score: 2) by Kunasou on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:29PM
I still use Opera Presto in my Linux, it works fast even on really old machines, and its memory usage is lower than any browser I used in the last few years. I love using Opera Dragonfly, I tried other dev tools like Firebug though. I'll end up using Palemoon, since I didn't like how Mozilla changed Firefox GUI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @11:36PM
Back in the day (when I would still allow closed-source software on my box), from time to time I would run across a page that was *NOT* HTML.
It didn't render properly and it was obvious that the guy who built it had no clue what **Validate your code** means.
The browser would have to *guess* what that idiot dev meant.
Sometimes, trying a different browser with a different rendering engine would yield a better guess.
Opera/Presto was occasionally useful for that.
I note that I have become far less tolerant with non-standard pages.
If your page isn't useful with everything blocked except readable text, I have no use for your page.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:02PM
Presto or GTFO. After more than a decade I dropped Opera a few months ago and went full Firefox. If i wanted a chromium-based browser, i'd use Chrome. And i'm pretty sure this new vivaldi can't beat Firefox+extensions right now.
(Score: 1) by iWantToKeepAnon on Thursday January 29 2015, @08:27PM
I opened up BOE/Cmc here at work and started to type in my employee# and found myself on another tab. Apparently the hotkeys work when the focus is in a input field. So I typed my login info in the search box and cut and paste it into the login and it worked. So the rendering and js engine is decent. I focused the 1 of X page input box to jump forward to page 3 and wound up on another tab again. Boo.
I don't like that much, but I understand this is a very early on tech-preview. So for all the "wheres the add-ons", etc.... Give 'em some time. But seeing this behavior, I'll have to check back later.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meisterister on Friday January 30 2015, @12:47AM
I would do the following:
1. Develop on Linux first, because I only use windows for games or because it handles my parallel port better than CUPS can.
2. Split off a thread per tab (since most people now have many tabs and many cores).
3a. Automatically stop scripts on a page if they use too much RAM or CPU.
3b. Add a button to the UI that suspends/resumes scripts in case the user is getting pissed off at the constant page loads and such.
4. Have a UI similar to Mozilla, Netscape, or Firefox 3.x (ie. fully featured)
5. Try to optimize for SSE (of the various varieties) and MMX.
6. Stay the hell away from Google.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:33PM
related to Opera webbrowser, anyone tried the Otter browser yet?
it is open source and supposed to be like classic Opera.