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comment by zonk
zonk  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The web browser of the future?

As I wrote in the other post, the main information about the browser is currently still hidden in the blog. Behind the browser is, if you register and decide to use it, some 'community' stuff like a blog, a free email, photo sharing/webspace. Just as the old Opera used to (or still does?).

Currently you really notice that it's based on Chrome in the backend, but the thing that makes it different from other browsers is the team behind it. If you check the blog you will recognize a lot of familiar faces (if you were into Opera sub 12) and that generally stands for innovation and reliability. This is why the browser already gets so much media attention.

Guess where Tabs come from? Opera. Speed dial? Opera. Integrated mail? Opera. Pop-up/ad blocker? Opera. Tab stacking? Opera. Customizability is heavily encouraged and the developer try to make it possible for the consumers. Last snapshot they integrated a setting to scale the whole UI, a feature that I wanted for my Firefox for ages but I had to look for minimalistic skins instead, which were broken in the UI remake the other patch. If you press CTRL + Q or F2 in Vivaldi, you already have a neat new feature that is not existing in other browsers, and it'll help you to surf/navigate your browser more quickly. They already have tab tiling in the client, which allows you to split the view of the browser for two or more tabs and browse them at the same time (I've used that for reddit-streams.com in one tab and the stream in the other tab for example, or to surf and compare prices/features of articles)

A lot of 'hardcore users' (which is the target audience for Vivaldi as well as Opera <12) have a lot of faith in the team to deliver innovation and awesome stuff, and in the past they delivered. As I said, I prefer Vivaldi already over my Firefox, and Vivaldi is in development for less than 5 months. For the beta there are high hopes for sync and mail being integrated and each snapshot has more awesome stuff in it, and they get released every 1-2 weeks. They're catching up pretty fast already and have stuff that other browsers don't have.

Is the browser for you? I can't say, the target group is not the casual user who goes on google to search something, then on YouTube to watch 3 clips and go offline again. Those people won't notice a lot of difference and might be more content with old and familiar settings/environments. But if you have 20 tabs open and your hobby is surfing the web up to 6 hours a day or more, then yeah, you should definitely keep an eye out on the browser and check what the team created this time. Also, of course it still has some rough edges, since it's not even beta, but so far it's running smoothly.