The Vivaldi Browser is released. Its from Opera founder von Tetzchner, the guy who did Opera Presto.

Its just a preview. It needs a lot of work.

https://vivaldi.com

nd paste-and-go by keybind does not work when the address bar is switched off. Am I the only using browsers this way?

Many things don't work in Vivaldi/Chropera when the menubar or addressbar isn't visible or switched off. At least in Otter F8 still works in fullscreen mode, although somewhat oddly imo. I think Firefox often handles such use cases most elegantly and consistently in spite of its odd Chrome envy.

I stated the same issues in Vivaldi forums. It turns out that right-click+scroll can be enabled in hard-to-find settings. The side-effect is that scroll on tabbar becomes enabled too (undesirable for me).

And paste-and-go supposedly works without addressbar in the very latest snapshot.

I just started looking at Vivaldi, after a year. Quite an improvement. There are still a few rough edges but I now feel comfortable using it.

I'm trying it now as my default browser and hopefully be able to keep it as such.

I have also found a function for Vivaldi lately: To keep a single little FB messenger chat window open.

Right now I downloaded Chropera to see how it compares in this function. Surprise surprise (not really), Chropera has both a FB messenger and a Whatsapp button ready in the sidebar for you, out of the box!

Functions like this make better sense when the browser has something like True Detach, a function that has historically existed only in old Opera. Such a detached window would make perfect sense as a messenger or music-player windowette somewhere in the corner of the screen, but as long as there is no True Detach in any browser, our best approximation is to open a separate browser app modified for the purpose.

New Chropera has created a limited emulation of True Detach - video popout. It's limited and poor in many ways. First, as the announcement says, it's apparently only meant to work on YT and other video-heavy pages, instead of on absolutely any page. Second, the popout requires its own plugins or codecs or whateveryoucallit for the video to play. In my current setup (Linux with i3wm) the video popout created a black silent quadrangular blot that cannot be moved and just stays there even after I closed the main browser window. The blot would be tolerable if it (a) played something, (b) could be moved and resized at will and (c) the main window stopped playing as soon as the popout started playing. As it is, it just misbehaves in every possible way.

But yeah, I admit I have been using Vivaldi for FB messenger, because Seamonkey keeps getting script errors on that page. During my current brief look into the settings of new Chropera I was unable to find the place/method to alter/add keybinds, whereas in Vivaldi it's easily found and it has pretty much everything I want, such as removal and adding of toolbars by keyboard shortcut, so I must prefer Vivaldi over Chropera.

And Vivaldi offers a transparent option to sidebar any webpage. Maybe Chropera does that too, but not as transparently. Not that I use this option, but there seems to be more reminiscent of old Opera in Vivaldi than in Chropera.

Wonder if I'm the only one who finds the Wikipedia input for Vivaldi funny.

The browser is aimed at staunch technologists, heavy Internet users, and previous Opera web browser users disgruntled by Opera's transition from the Presto layout engine to the Blink layout engine

And the below at the end of the article:

Vivaldi uses the Blink rendering engine, as Google Chrome and Opera do.

@krake It's sad really. First, it's sad because non-standard pages like FB were allowed to be born. Second, those pages took over people's lives and became the Next Big Thing. Third, they were announced to be the new standard, Internet 2.0 or such crap. Fourth, rather than adhering to the actual web standards, webbrowsers began, by popular demand, to cater to the new heavy webpages, otherwise keeping to the lowest common denominator instead of being true to the standards. The total nonsense browser Google Chrome led this development and became the new de facto standard-bearer. Everybody else lags far behind. Sad really.

Wonder if I'm the only one who finds the Wikipedia input for Vivaldi funny.

The browser is aimed at staunch technologists, heavy Internet users, and previous Opera web browser users disgruntled by Opera's transition from the Presto layout engine to the Blink layout engine

And the below at the end of the article:

Vivaldi uses the Blink rendering engine, as Google Chrome and Opera do.

I wish the others (Vivaldi, Opera) would get away from Chrome. Won't happen. It saves devel effort/cost.

I like the many built in customizations available Vivaldi. Vivaldi requires far fewer extensions to get what I want than on Firefox.

@krake

disgruntled by Opera's transition from the Presto layout engine to the Blink layout engine

I'm not overly pleased by that but it's hardly why I'm disgruntled about the current simulacrum that calls itself Opera. Also, that phrasing is decidedly unencyclopedic and violates Wikipedia's guidelines.

Speaking of Firefox, since I don't think we have a dedicated topic here are some links I saw the other day.

the All-in-One Sidebar turned twelve this year. Is this a reason for a party? I don't think so, because I announce the end of development, the end of life of this extension.

What are the reasons, you may ask. There are a handful of reasons, but mainly there is one reason caused by life, and one reason caused by Mozilla.

[...]

The other main reason is, that even if I had free time and desire, I now would stop the development, because of the upcoming release of Firefox 57. Maybe you know that Mozilla plans to make Firefox 57 the first version of the browser that supports only WebExtensions. I spent some time to check if I could migrate AiOS to a WebExtension, but it's simply not possible, even if I would completely rewrite the extension. Manipulation of the browser window's interface and functionality is extremely limited by definition.

They say they've made sure Firebug and NoScript will continue working. That's great, but the new Firebug and NoScript won't be made on Firefox anymore this way, will they?

Dedoimedo also published an article about this the other day.

Firefox without CTR modifications looks like any typical modern browser - an abstract representation of stupidity. Tabs on top will go down the history lanes as one of those things that were created for the sake of it, justified post-creation as the next best thing since the Spanish Inquisition, and will remain around despite being a manifestation of all that it wrong in this world, even worse than hunger and Ebola.

So if you can't have a sane browser, what can you? Well, you know you can't really customize Chrome, but it has always been that way, you don't expect to. With Firefox, you can play with half a dozen options and buttons, which go top right, plus icons for your various extensions, just like Chrome. No more status bar. No more tabs on bottom. No more back, forward, reload and stop buttons as they used to be. It feels minimalistic, but not in a good way. Yes, you can get used to it, the same way you can get used to working in a mine quarry.

[...]

The price to pay is quite high. The reward isn't good enough. Not visually and not actually. The performance isn't as good as you'd hope, so you would be willing to sacrifice ancient extensions for the sake of awesome speed. Nope. Chrome remains ahead in pure user experience responsiveness, and with both browsers now sharing the same pointless design, Firefox losses still more points, because it has neutered all and any advantage over Chrome by moving to WebExtensions.

I don't know if Firefox ever regains its smooth elegance that it had around 2011, but whatever it does, it's still on the defensive. Chrome is ahead, and should remain so, because so far, it has. With one big difference. It remains largely consistent, and the changes, when they happen, are mostly invisible. Firefox goes for a highly disruptive revolution, willingly sacrificing old for new. But why would there be new?

All in all, it seems we will get another happy-go-lucky browser, without any distinct features, maybe, hopefully a few useful extensions, and performance that is not quite as good as its chief rival. And if you tell me you need the latest and greatest CPU to realize the benefits, then you're deluded. Browsers aren't computer games. They should be slim and fast, and if they cannot realize the entire spectrum of computing power available, then it's a lousy implementation. The perceived slowness and startup speed issues remain. And unless solved, there will be nothing to give Firefox the edge.

If I wanted Chrome, I'd be using Opera as my main browser. It's probably the best Chromium. Anyway, I guess Firefox is panicking because they're bleeding users. I just don't see how getting rid of anything that makes it unique is supposed to stop that.

Being very much in a True Detach mood today, I share my current best recommendations to achieve this effect. Roughly in the order of bestness.

1. A minimal browser

A minimal browser has minimal interface out of the box, basically just the title bar (mandated by the window manager) and the combined status+navigation bar. To achieve something like True Detach, just open such a browser. That's it. If you are extra lucky, it has a rendering engine that can play anything you need. More likely not though.

2. Pale Moon

This Mozilla derivative has a fabulous toolbarless mode that you can try out as follows:

- Under Preferences > Tabs, uncheck Always show the tab bar
- Under View menu, uncheck the Bookmarks toolbar, then the Navigation toolbar, and finally the Menu bar

What is left is something like a minimal browser. What's super awesome about it is that, in this state, Pale Moon has a popup secondary address field under the common keybinds Alt+d and Ctrl+l, so the browser remains completely usable without menus and toolbars.

A new tab and the tab bar opens up by Ctrl+t. By right-clicking on the empty space in the tab bar you will get your toolbars back. By the way, Seamonkey (the successor of Mozilla Suite) works the same way, except that the secondary address field is only under Ctrl+l.

This is an area where modern FF totally lost it.

3. Otter

In Otter, all toolbars can be hidden either by right-click or menus, like in Pale Moon, or by keybinds that you have to build. Otter has a less elaborate, but functional secondary address field. Additionally, there is a separate popup to go to bookmarks like in old Opera.

Honorary mention: Vivaldi browser

Under Tools > Settings > Appearance, Vivaldi has the Show User Interface checkmark. Vivaldi turns into a minimal browser by this setting. This is a fabulous setting, but it's better to make it into a keybind. Under Keyboard, find View > Toggle UI and put your preferred keyboard shortcut there.

With these settings, Vivaldi's interface morphs faster than Pale Moon's, but Vivaldi cannot earn a better place on this list due to lack of access to a (secondary) address field in this state. As far as I can see, to use the address field, you have to turn the interface back on.

I asked the question in Vivaldi forum and I got the reply: Quick commands. Indeed, Vivaldi's Quick commands do more than old Opera. You can search for anything in Quick commands, in this case for Address bar and select it and the address bar returns. While this does the trick, it is (a) slower than having a direct keybind to secondary address field and (b) loses the minimality. Edit: Looks like the Quick commands field doesn't just search, but acts as a secondary address field just by typing a url in there. I guess I have to raise Vivaldi on this list

Haaaa! A lot of disgruntled ex-Opera users are referring to it as "Opium", now. Their old forum moderators got dead pissed about it and banned a load of us, for that. Like we were worried...

Funny, really, as it's hardly addictive.

Their old forum moderators got dead pissed about it and banned a load of us, for that.

At the time I was posting there one didn't get banned so easy - at least not for criticizing their new fake Opera.
I recall lashing out even at Bruce Lawson (their new PR guru at that time) proving him a liar.

Last time I threw a look at their forum, I saw a bunch of new moderators - some of them ridiculous fanboys.

Steve (if I recall exactly sgunhouse was his nick, he was a gun freak) is the one I kept in fond memory. 

It was silly, really. Opera was the only browser I ever used, other than for testing purposes. But, they killed it, as Mozilla are doing, to Firefox. I used that way back when it was Firebird. As many have noted, if we wanted to use Chrome, we'd get Chrome.

This killing off of addons that a lot of people rely on, they're just gonna get people sticking with the old version, security risk or no. I'm the same with W7. I tried W10 and abhorred it. Then, just by using Windoze updates, they forced it on a lot of people. So, we all disabled updates. Again, sod the security risks. After all, many deem W10 to be a security risk, in itself.

I get around that, now, by using WSUS Offline Update.

I recall lashing out even at Bruce Lawson (their new PR guru at that time) proving him a liar.

He worked at Opera from '07/'08-ish to 2016 (source), so not that new even in 2013. I don't remember noticing him until '09.

I had no idea when he started his job at Opera but I was speaking of his appearance as PR man and fire-fighter in the Forums. This occured shortly before the transition to Google. The transition was praised as some changes under the hood that nobody will notice.
I didn't buy this from the very beginning but imagine the shock of some Opera veterans when the first alpha of the new browser was released.

It was always clear that it would be something like Otter or Vivaldi. I don't think anybody bought that just some small changes under the hood was even really possible, at the very least without breaking a lot of the UserCSS and UserJS people like me were into.^[1] But yeah, I was fairly shocked to see Chrome with FlipBack and FlipForward rather than something akin to Otter or Vivaldi. It seemed like they didn't even try.

If they had advertised it the same way they talked about their Project Reborn from the get-go I wouldn't have liked it, but that deceptive strategy you mention definitely stung.

¹ I was slightly peeved that they didn't seem to take much interest in fixing regressions in CSS and SVG rendering in particular, in those cases where I bothered to notify them. Which is weird, because back in the Presto era I'd reported a dozen or so niche CSS and HTML bugs and they were often already fixed by the time the next snapshot rolled around. Sure, in Blink/WebKit it might've been something known since the mid-2000s that in no one cares about. But for Opera it was a brand-new regression. That's my stance and I'm sticking with it. Oddly enough most of the things I cared about were fixed by Intel. I didn't even know they were into browser development.

Opera had me rereport those known WebKit issues on the Blink bug tracker, because apparently Blink didn't bother to import WebKit bugs. I kind of felt like I was doing their work for them at that point. ↵

A funny (no, actually sad) detail: Every browser since the beginning of the internet can do alt text, but Webkit derivatives need an extension for it https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/image-alt-text-viewer/hinbolcnfifkhlcehoakdledkfjiaeeg

Now I'm tempted to install Konqueror to see how KHTML fares (or have they discontinued it in favor of the WebKit fork?). The odd thing is that Apple is supposedly the best about accessibility (e.g., for blind people).

Every browser since the beginning of the internet can do alt text, but Webkit derivatives need an extension for it

I can't imagine that Webkit derivatives can't handle the alt attribute.
I'm too lazy to test but I'm afraid that you totally misunderstood something.
That extension is for switching between images and their respective alt text.

@krake Actually I just verified that Otter does not display the alt text when you disable images, the way Firefox and real Opera do. You just get a question mark. In Opera/Blink you don't even get that. Curiously, in Vivaldi it does work. Apparently not all Blinks are equally bad.

But I assume that if you hover over the shown image, the alt text gets displayed.

Nowadays there are very few people browsing the Internet with images disabled. Those who do, don't want to get distracted by images. An alternative text can be for them a distraction too.

But I assume that if you hover over the shown image, the alt text gets displayed. 

I don't think any browser other than IE does that (maybe Edge). On other browsers you'd have to use a UserJS to map the alt attribute to the title attribute if that's something you want.

Nowadays there are very few people browsing the Internet with images disabled. Those who do, don't want to get distracted by images. An alternative text can be for them a distraction too.

It's still indicative of a trend in which WebKitBlink litters the web with shoddy implementations, causing less competent so-called developers to think something "doesn't work" in Fx when they (and Blink) are doing it wrong. Although oddly enough since the divorce both WebKit and Blink seem to have improved in quality.

I don't think any browser other than IE does that (maybe Edge). On other browsers you'd have to use a UserJS to map the alt attribute to the title attribute if that's something you want.

IE 7 and earlier but you are right.

It's still indicative of a trend in which WebKitBlink litters the web with shoddy implementations, causing less competent so-called developers to think something "doesn't work" in Fx when they (and Blink) are doing it wrong. Although oddly enough since the divorce both WebKit and Blink seem to have improved in quality.

I've looked it up. According to W3C - Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and Opera are supporting the alt attribute.
Excepting Opera, the above are all actually maintained/developed engines.
Wondering though which Opera they mean since you tested Chropera and it doesn't support the alt attribut.

Perhaps there's a disconnect in the Chromia between purposefully disabling images and images not loading for some reason. The page I used for testing is this one: https://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_image_test ^[1]

Opera/Presto, Firefox and Vivaldi display the text "Smiley face" when you disable images. WebKit (in Otter) displays a question mark square image placeholder (if you've ever used IE it looks very similar to that) and Blink (in Opera) displays nothing at all.

¹ It might be something similar to http://html5test.com/ The results there are utterly meaningless (although to be fair, the test says so itself in the disclaimer) since WebKitBlink has shoddy support for loads of things but merrily goes around shouting how much it supports. Google claims that they're now hiding new shoddy "experimental" support behind developer flags (you know, like Mozilla has done for decades) so hopefully that's no longer an issue.↵

Perhaps there's a disconnect in the Chromia between purposefully disabling images and images not loading for some reason.

The only browsers I have at hand are OperaPresto and Firefox.
You could write a minimalistic html where the source (src="../Mix/_ABA.png") is mismatching with your image file name (AAA.png) and see if it works then.

You can also do that online (I linked to an online editor after all ) and the reason I hadn't is because I don't particularly care.

Anyway, the results are:

• Show all images: works fine
• Do not show any images: zip, nada
• Wrong URL: alt text appears
• Switch back to working URL: alt text remains