I’ve used Vivaldi for a bit, and it’s a nice browser. Coming from Chrome, there is a pretty painless transition since most extensions will work fine.
However, Vivaldi does nothing to improve the state of the web. It’s just another webkit, fostering the monoculture; and their business model and practices are basically the same as Google’s, just on a smaller scale.
Care to expand on "their business model and practices are basically same as Google's?"
As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right?
Last I checked (admittedly a couple of years ago), they also did some tracking behind the scenes, in the bit of code that they had pointedly not released. The undercurrent vibe at the time was that there was no real guarantee that they wouldn't shop around your aggregated data; all I read in that interview is that they have not been "forced" to do it yet, but hey, "life is life" kinda thing. They still do little more than throwing tarballs over the fence every once in a while, with a muddy license that follows the letter rather than the spirit of opensource. There is no real bugtracker nor transparent development practices.
I understand why they do it (people gotta eat), but to me that looks even less trustworthy than Mozilla, which at least has a certain entrenched culture that typically tries (not always successfully) to blunt the worst corporate decisions, and follows real opensource practices.
My impression is that they've explicitly advertised their intention not to sell user data:
We’ve always taken data security extremely seriously. And we’ve long believed that everything you store in your browser belongs to you — which is why we’ll never sell your data, or willingly compromise your privacy
New copy on the day Chrome is in the middle of a privacy-related storm, what a coincidence.
From the (older) interview you linked: 'The aim is to earn a dollar per year per user. "We're almost there," he says. "I think we can do more than that and still be nice guys and not sell out our users or do anything silly."' That's hardly cast-iron, especially considering that Opera did indeed sell out eventually (yeah I know that "it was complicated", but that's basically what it boiled down to). But hey, in the end, trust is individual, so more power to them. I just think their impact on the web at large will never be as significant as Mozilla's, if they continue on this track.
Google is more than a browser manufacturer. Their business model is mostly ads. Things like Chrome feed back into that (collecting data on people and using it to personalize other experiences... like ads). How is Vivaldi's business model similar?
The chances that we can digest food in the same way as rodents do, are much lower than the chances that blink will render a webpage like webkit does :)
It says this right on the OP's link: "Vivaldi has always honored its users’ rights to data privacy and protection. There is no need to collect your personal information. We don’t track you. Period.
We encourage users to explore privacy-conscious options and educate themselves on the basics of web browser security. This year we integrated DuckDuckGo as our default Private Search, and added Qwant to the list of suggested search engines (which includes StartPage as well). All of these are great tools for taking back your privacy. We’re continuing to explore ways to protect Vivaldi users and this will always be a top priority."
It ossifies every layer of the stack below it. Once you have a practical monoculture, user demand effectively cements the entire underlying operating system design to cater to the browser implementation. Fine if you're selling Chromebooks, but fatal for innovation.
Once the operating system is encased in amber, only a massive budget can break new ground -- this is why things like Plan 9 from Bell Labs will never take off. It's why Haiku is importing more and more BSD code instead of pursuing their own paradigms. It's why the only realistic chance for anything new is Google's Fuchsia; they're one of a very few organizations who can afford to innovate in this environment.
> It's why Haiku is importing more and more BSD code instead of pursuing their own paradigms.
We are? Uhh ... not really?
We use FreeBSD's WiFi stack and drivers (same as the other BSDs), and have plans to import some of FreeBSD's work to get linuxdrm/gallium for hardware acceleration. That's it.
Probably a good thing on the surface - less work for devs in terms of compatibility checks. Add competition has made all browsers less complacent, improved performance everywhere, sped up adoption of new tech and general been an adrenaline shot. Much less talk nowadays of “will browsers support it?”
Until the headline reads "Vivaldi source code released", the browser is irrelevant. They really need to get their act together on this point, there's no excuse for a closed source web browser in 2018.
What do you mean by irrelevant? How does open sourcing it makes it relevant?
If it means privacy, one could just monitor network activity and see if it's making weird connections instead of going through gigantic source repo which most people can't even tell what's going on.
Edge and Safari are barely relevant and my argument applies equally to them. Chrome is just a few patches on top of Chromium, but again my argument aplies - no one should be using given that Chromium is basically the same.
I love Vivaldi. Really a great browser. Special the you can see more than one tab at once, that's a really nice feature on todays large 32" and 43" screens.
I wonder why nobody else does it. Vivaldi has it since beginning.
It looks to me like makers of major web browsers generally cater to the lowest common denominator, or slightly less cynically, but effectively equivalently, aim for a large or universal audience. Their design looks almost indistinguishable from what they would come up with operating by the motto "features confuse users".
Vivaldi has it from beginning because von Tetzchner came from Opera, which also did this back in the day. Their pre-chrome version was an MDI application.
Yes, this. The ability to drag and resize them now is just brilliant. I pretty much only use it to view two pages side-by-side, but when you try it with 4 or 5 tabs the resizing is a dream.
I do that with other browsers with multiple windows. Meta+left and meta+right (in cinnamon and many other desktop UIs) automatically place the window in the left and right half of the monitor.
Sync is good, but if they want to sway me away from either Firefox or Chrome, that sync needs to include syncing with a mobile browser. Otherwise it satisfies a 20% case for sync while missing the 80% case.
Finally! I've been waiting for this for days now :)
Most exciting feature for me are the auto-hiding and floating panels. Auto-hiding as in they disappear if you click anywhere outside them and floating as in they don't resize the actual browser window but instead cover it, so they don't cause pages to reflow their content, which can be annoying at times.
Trying out Vivaldi 2.0, tab management is much better than Firefox, e.g. Vertical Tab View shows closed tabs, I can drag & drop closed tabs into a window to just reopen them.
Does anyone know if Vivaldi (and Brave), render HTML/CSS/JS just like Chrome does?
I know they are both based on Chromium, but just wondering if Google adds some "Googliness" to Chrome?
As a web developer, if I just test my sites against Vivaldi, Brave, or other Chromium based browsers, can I guaranteed the rendering will be identical to Chrome? Or is it safer to also test in Chrome?
Also, do all Chrome extensions work on Chromium based browsers?
In the light of all the negative attention Chrome 69 has been getting around these parts I've found Vivaldi to be a very pleasant, more privacy-focused alternative.
...and yet still no way to customize the toolbar. Am I seriously the only one out there who can't stand having a pointless Home Button taking up space?
My biggest gripe with Vivaldi is that the first option when right clicking a link is to open in new tab and focus it. This seems like a small issue, but this is different to all major browsers which has open in new _background_ tab as the default option. There is 10 years of muscle memory for me to overcome to switch and I just can't do it.
Just checked, you are right! The issue was actually that it focuses the tab when you open it, it does not open it in the background. I have clarified the comment, thanks!
I've been wondering about this for a while. Especially now that they're actively supplying servers to support sync (which also at least at the time of writing doesn't seem to allow running your own server).
I think Jon said somewhere that to start being profitable they needed something about 3 million users, and Vivaldi already has more than 800 000 according to their page and I heard some other sites saying it's already at over 1 million.
Actually I don't thinks it's so surprising, the 90s did not have tracking and companies have survived and grown.
But tracking is probably +5x more profitable minimum, while Vivaldi or Mozilla might get some $1/user Google probably makes $5-$15/user. And the reason of all the tracking and why companies fight so hard against legislation that try to cut their cash cow.
I use firefox as my primary browser but used chrome as secondary for misc. Did away with chrome recently and am trying vivaldi.
So far i observed that session restart is not reliable. Tab open by default takes you to the page and there is an option to open tab in background but its quite annoying that its not the default. Calling a norm as being out of place is quite a stand. Developers who normally have the tendency to open multiple pages at once from search results will find this feature bothersome when trying it out.
I don't think its a game changer but can be a worthy contender for a secondary browser option.
I love it. It feels like I'm using Opera 12 again. 72 open tabs in my current window with 24 closed tabs.
What's even nicer is having tabs grouped by topics I've been looking at where I collapse most of them to save visual space in the tab tree.
Bookmark sync was the last thing I needed to switch away from Opera. It helps to have shared bookmarks when I run separate profiles for work and hobbies.
Can any browser out there, Vivaldi or otherwise, take the tabs of a window and save the corresponding list of URLs so I can reopen that window of tabs at a later date?
That’s one essential feature I want from a browser, I’ve grown to desire more over the years, but for some strange reason, no browser I’ve seen out there allows you to treat sets of URLs as such.
Thanks for the extensions but my idea is more around browsers treating our activity more as multiple projects that we’re working on. Like associated files, they’re associated URLs. Extensions are fool, but you’d think the browser wars would spur greater innovation in this area.
I feel that browser wars have finished and the winners are Chrome and mobile Safari. Other browsers now fight for numbers so advanced features are not really a priority.
My idea is inspired by the way IDEs keep track of a system of associated files. If browsers could manage a project file that stores tab and window data that can be saved and restored, without using any built in bookmark feature so that the project file can be saved and stored in git, then I’d be deliriously happy about this.
Safari can save all of a window's tabs to a bookmark folder, and it supports opening a whole folder as a new window.
There's no "sync", though; if you save the tabs to a folder, then open the folder as tabs, there's no link to update the folder again. Saving the new window as tabs will create another folder.
Not exactly what you asked for, but for what it's worth Firefox will happily accept and open a list of URLs that you drag and drop from your text file into the browser. I just tried it.
What’s your OS? You can do that on macOS via AppleScript. Works on Safari, Chrome, and possibly Vivaldi. Won’t work on Firefox because they don’t support AppleScript.
Was hoping to save to a file, (call it a project file) that can then be subject to git versioning, retrieved later and suddenly it’s all back where it was, without using bookmarks.
I tried Vivaldi a year ago. It was nice to have greater amount of customizations and I liked it very much. But, I couldn't use it for longer as it had memory leaks, so, if you opened and closed lot of tabs, you had to restart the Vivaldi from time to time.
But, this might have been fixed and i should recheck.
Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now
Firefox is likely to remain my default browser, but there's a lot to like about Vivaldi.
> Last time I tried Vivaldi (over a year ago), the browser shortcuts were taking precedence over website shortcuts. I noticed this in Google Sheets and others. I hope that's fixed now
I feel that's how it should be.
OS > Browser > Browser Extension > Website
Using some sites(JIRA in particular) in Firefox is painful as they just capture every keypress/combo regardless of whether they need it or not. Yes, it's lazy on the website devs part but that is why I think they should be last in line.
You're not wrong, but what I meant is that they were conflicts, and the browser's shortcuts took precedence. Like Ctrl+b to bold text and others. Many threads were open on this problem on the Vivaldi forum. I was not used to this with Chrome and Firefox, so it surprised me.
I want to give this a try but I'm relying heavily on Firefox Containers now to separate different login sessions. I wonder if there's something similar on Vivaldi(Chrome)
I was really hoping 2.0 would include the integrated e-mail client they teased a looong time ago. By now I think that is the only feature I still miss from the Opera 12 days.
The email client was also really handy for reading rss feeds. It made the notes tool more useful for grabbing web content and then composing an email with it.
Because it's a total mess. I've worked on a protocol re-implementation for personal use, and I assure you it's quite ugly. And it's a moving target that changes once in a while, so supporting that is essentially being at Mozilla's mercy.
Mozilla's Kinto could do the trick, though. I haven't dug inside but protocol-wise it looks quite good to my personal tastes. I believe this is what actually Mozilla wants to eventually switch Sync to.
And if sync can be done with dumb backend storing encrypted blobs, then WebDAV is the most ubiquitous and simple option. Although it lacks realtime notifications which are quite important for sync.
Sync is not just about bookmarks, but also about open tabs and passwords.
I'd say it's quite desirable for one's phone to immediately catch up with their desktop. Open the same site using the tab list, have the password ready, etc.
Sync-1.5 and Accounts. I used to run Sync-1.0 and it was okay. At least I didn't have to bother about protocol details. And now, even though it's FLOSS, it's still unmaintained abandonware so I don't think it's a good target.
1.5 is very different to 1.0.
Just consider the fact that to log in to Accounts and use Sync you need to use three auth protocols: HAWK, OAuth2 and BrowserID. And serve a webpage with some custom JS (that iOS version for some reason would reject to load).
And Sync alone is full of proprietary[1] stuff like X-Weave-Timestamp headers, application/newlines MIME type (seriously, not even a vendor extension), etc. It could've easily been WebDAV plus a few small protocol extensions where things didn't fit well. It is not.
____
[1] "Proprietary" as in "unique to this project, neither used by anything else, nor usable by anything else because it's poorly documented moving target without change warnings" not as in "non-FLOSS".
for the last few months I had that the browser was painfully slow for me, especially when opening new tabs, on a 2014 Macbook Pro so I had to stop using it while on the road. I recently installed v2.x(Snapshot) and it's back to being very performant. I don't know if what you experienced has been fixed but I think it's worth a shot seeing that it's a major release and a lot of things have changed.
I am so happy to be using my favorite browser again!
This is the only reason I don't use Chromium based browsers on Linux - they don't support auto scrolling like Firefox. There is an addon however it does not work that well. Also why can FF do it without an extension and Chromium can't?
Still, first post from Vivaldi. Gonna give it a try, mostly for the tab management features included by default. Could never get any of the new tab group extensions to work quite right (or at all) in Firefox after quantum. Also built-in vertical tabs and hibernate background tabs option!
Even though I'll prob end up back at Firefox anyway since FOSS..
Firefox is spending millions on political goals, failed OS' etc. Only a small portion is put into the progress of FF - speeding up rendering a notable exception.
Too bad the founder was kicked out for political reasons. It would have been nice if FF could have focused on technology, while being agnostic to the politics.
And it was for political reasons that stood to directly affect an unknown number of his employees, the people whose lives would be directly affected by his donation to the anti-gay marriage thing; if those people raise a stink because he's trying to use government to interfere in their lives, I can't fault them.
"I'm going to use my wealth and power to negatively impact your life -- but don't talk about it, that's political." Nope.
No, he wasn't. He wasn't accepted as CEO by enough employees, but he could have stepped down and retained another position in the company, like CTO. Even he recognizes that Mozilla leadership wanted him to stay on board, but he chose to quit and pursue his own project. Which is fine. It just doesn't mean he was "forced" out any more than the people who quit because they couldn't stand him being CEO were "forced" out.
Why are you asserting false claims without being able to support them?
As CEO I had already reorged Mozilla, and CTO was lined up for someone else (Andreas Gal). I was not offered any particular C level position by anyone with authority over such things.
I did not leave because of any of my employees objecting to me. If you are thinking of the handful of Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted on March 27th against me (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...), none of them worked for me. The Mozilla Foundation is arms-length from the Mozilla Corporation.
I also did not quit to pursue my own project; Brave was not founded until May 2015. I resigned to avoid Mozilla taking any more damage from mob action kicked off by someone who demanded that I be "completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla" (http://web.archive.org/web/20180621041436/http://www.teamrar... -- the blog seems broken but the Web archive has snapshots).
It's clear you just asserted falsehoods that make you comfortable. But you not only did not know what you were asserting to be true, you could not possibly know whether it was true. That's wishful thinking at best, and tantamount to lying at worst.
"The" founder? Eich was hired by the original Netscape, and ended up as one of the many "founders" that moved to the Mozilla project from there. He did not "found" Firefox either, that project was started by others.
I have nothing against political work, but I think they should just give money to the EFF instead of doing their own - they are much better at the job, imagine what they would do with 300M$.
And FF should focus on the browser because this is their cash cow, and progress is needed. But as the declining usage numbers show, FF employes just do what they want, riding FF to death then jumping ship to raid the next project. As a longtime FF user (25y) you're just left in the dust.
> Anybody got the breakdown on community commits to FF vs. employee commits?
Last time I saw anyone try to do this, it was vastly predominately employee commits (this isn't that surprising, there are hundreds of people working full-time on Firefox at Mozilla, and very few spending a comparable amount of time per day in the larger community); it's hard to get exact numbers because determining whether a commit is by an employee or not is hard (e.g., there's no requirement for employees to use Mozilla email addresses for their commits).
Ever since they forced out Brendan (co-founder and creator of javascript no less) because of their political intolerance, FF has really started to go down hill. Each release you have to go through more about:config settings to turn off all their "helper" apps (ie. spyware partnerships).
> Ever since they forced out Brendan [...] FF has really started to go down hill
I'm sorry you weren't around when Firefox (then called Phoenix) was really good, but most FF problems pre-date 2014. They are actually being addressed just about now.
I used Phoenix (from about 0.6 IIRC) and for the most part had FF as my main browser - trialing alternatives occasionally (Opera, Flock, Chrome, etc.) and doing web testing with others (Links, IEx, android browser, Maxthon, etc.).
When Eich was ousted it seemed like things took a sea change and we started getting "commercial" stuff shoved in our faces (alright, stuck on our toolbars). Firefox doesn't appear to be a high moral FOSS project trying to release us from the grip of commercial enterprise taking over the web -- as it did to me before. They went from being very user-centric to being a bit more like Microsoft (of old, at least): "we added a non-removable addon to /our/ browser", rather than "would you like to add this addon to your browser".
Now I've no idea if the removal of Eich's influence on "business philosophy" was behind that; could be a coincidence. But, either way FF seems to have changed for the worse IMO.
Mind, I'm still mourning the demise of Opera Unite -- with their browser as a server concept -- which seemed to be on track to change the focus of the web and give us the distributed peering that has always seemed to be the proper focus for the web+internet.
Nah, the tension was already there, since forever. It’s just that, after the failure of the misguided FFOS white elephant, they have gone back to the realization that their main source of funding will remain the browser for the foreseeable future, and that inspired (and inspires) some poor choices here and there. Eich’s departure was coincidental, imho. Quantum (which is very good) came way after he left, for example.
Personally I feel like Firefox has made significant progress this year in particular. Mostly because of the performance improvements. I haven't noticed any 'spyware partnerships' and that would certainly concern me.
Vivaldi has severe touchpad scroll lag under Windows, making it neigh unusable (with and without smooth scrolling enabled). How do developers manage to consistently break functionality that is natively implemented correctly in the OS?
However, Vivaldi does nothing to improve the state of the web. It’s just another webkit, fostering the monoculture; and their business model and practices are basically the same as Google’s, just on a smaller scale.
As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right?
[0]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 [1]: http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzch...
I understand why they do it (people gotta eat), but to me that looks even less trustworthy than Mozilla, which at least has a certain entrenched culture that typically tries (not always successfully) to blunt the worst corporate decisions, and follows real opensource practices.
From the (older) interview you linked: 'The aim is to earn a dollar per year per user. "We're almost there," he says. "I think we can do more than that and still be nice guys and not sell out our users or do anything silly."' That's hardly cast-iron, especially considering that Opera did indeed sell out eventually (yeah I know that "it was complicated", but that's basically what it boiled down to). But hey, in the end, trust is individual, so more power to them. I just think their impact on the web at large will never be as significant as Mozilla's, if they continue on this track.
Google is more than a browser manufacturer. Their business model is mostly ads. Things like Chrome feed back into that (collecting data on people and using it to personalize other experiences... like ads). How is Vivaldi's business model similar?
Sorry, I'm so oldschool that for me the two are still basically the same -- after all, blink was a webkit fork, which was a khtml fork.
> How is Vivaldi's business model similar?
See my other comment.
We encourage users to explore privacy-conscious options and educate themselves on the basics of web browser security. This year we integrated DuckDuckGo as our default Private Search, and added Qwant to the list of suggested search engines (which includes StartPage as well). All of these are great tools for taking back your privacy. We’re continuing to explore ways to protect Vivaldi users and this will always be a top priority."
Ignoring that Blink and Webkit are feature identical, what negative effects are there with an open source rendering engine monoculture?
Once the operating system is encased in amber, only a massive budget can break new ground -- this is why things like Plan 9 from Bell Labs will never take off. It's why Haiku is importing more and more BSD code instead of pursuing their own paradigms. It's why the only realistic chance for anything new is Google's Fuchsia; they're one of a very few organizations who can afford to innovate in this environment.
We are? Uhh ... not really?
We use FreeBSD's WiFi stack and drivers (same as the other BSDs), and have plans to import some of FreeBSD's work to get linuxdrm/gallium for hardware acceleration. That's it.
[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/
If it means privacy, one could just monitor network activity and see if it's making weird connections instead of going through gigantic source repo which most people can't even tell what's going on.
Give me a freaking break.
Unless it is Chrome, or Safari, or Edge, ...
If the idea is to save screen space that's a non-starter.
Most exciting feature for me are the auto-hiding and floating panels. Auto-hiding as in they disappear if you click anywhere outside them and floating as in they don't resize the actual browser window but instead cover it, so they don't cause pages to reflow their content, which can be annoying at times.
Trying out Vivaldi 2.0, tab management is much better than Firefox, e.g. Vertical Tab View shows closed tabs, I can drag & drop closed tabs into a window to just reopen them.
Phoenix was a breakout browser from the Mozilla suite, before it was renamed to Firefox, and that was around 2003 I think.
I know they are both based on Chromium, but just wondering if Google adds some "Googliness" to Chrome?
As a web developer, if I just test my sites against Vivaldi, Brave, or other Chromium based browsers, can I guaranteed the rendering will be identical to Chrome? Or is it safer to also test in Chrome?
Also, do all Chrome extensions work on Chromium based browsers?
But tracking is probably +5x more profitable minimum, while Vivaldi or Mozilla might get some $1/user Google probably makes $5-$15/user. And the reason of all the tracking and why companies fight so hard against legislation that try to cut their cash cow.
So far i observed that session restart is not reliable. Tab open by default takes you to the page and there is an option to open tab in background but its quite annoying that its not the default. Calling a norm as being out of place is quite a stand. Developers who normally have the tendency to open multiple pages at once from search results will find this feature bothersome when trying it out.
I don't think its a game changer but can be a worthy contender for a secondary browser option.
What's even nicer is having tabs grouped by topics I've been looking at where I collapse most of them to save visual space in the tab tree.
Bookmark sync was the last thing I needed to switch away from Opera. It helps to have shared bookmarks when I run separate profiles for work and hobbies.
That’s one essential feature I want from a browser, I’ve grown to desire more over the years, but for some strange reason, no browser I’ve seen out there allows you to treat sets of URLs as such.
https://www.one-tab.com/
There's no "sync", though; if you save the tabs to a folder, then open the folder as tabs, there's no link to update the folder again. Saving the new window as tabs will create another folder.
This plugin has "Copy all to clipboard" button which does that https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli
Tabs Backup & Restore dehocbglhkaogiljpihicakmlockmlgd
But, this might have been fixed and i should recheck.
Firefox is likely to remain my default browser, but there's a lot to like about Vivaldi.
I feel that's how it should be.
OS > Browser > Browser Extension > Website
Using some sites(JIRA in particular) in Firefox is painful as they just capture every keypress/combo regardless of whether they need it or not. Yes, it's lazy on the website devs part but that is why I think they should be last in line.
Mozilla's Kinto could do the trick, though. I haven't dug inside but protocol-wise it looks quite good to my personal tastes. I believe this is what actually Mozilla wants to eventually switch Sync to.
And if sync can be done with dumb backend storing encrypted blobs, then WebDAV is the most ubiquitous and simple option. Although it lacks realtime notifications which are quite important for sync.
It's not that bookmark-sync is so important for most people that they cannot wait some minutes till a periodical checker fetches the updates.
I'd say it's quite desirable for one's phone to immediately catch up with their desktop. Open the same site using the tab list, have the password ready, etc.
1.5 is very different to 1.0.
Just consider the fact that to log in to Accounts and use Sync you need to use three auth protocols: HAWK, OAuth2 and BrowserID. And serve a webpage with some custom JS (that iOS version for some reason would reject to load).
And Sync alone is full of proprietary[1] stuff like X-Weave-Timestamp headers, application/newlines MIME type (seriously, not even a vendor extension), etc. It could've easily been WebDAV plus a few small protocol extensions where things didn't fit well. It is not.
____
[1] "Proprietary" as in "unique to this project, neither used by anything else, nor usable by anything else because it's poorly documented moving target without change warnings" not as in "non-FLOSS".
I am so happy to be using my favorite browser again!
Is there a way to get the Firefox autoscrolling behavior, i.e. middle mouse click to toggle auto scroll mode?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...
Still, first post from Vivaldi. Gonna give it a try, mostly for the tab management features included by default. Could never get any of the new tab group extensions to work quite right (or at all) in Firefox after quantum. Also built-in vertical tabs and hibernate background tabs option!
Even though I'll prob end up back at Firefox anyway since FOSS..
And it was for political reasons that stood to directly affect an unknown number of his employees, the people whose lives would be directly affected by his donation to the anti-gay marriage thing; if those people raise a stink because he's trying to use government to interfere in their lives, I can't fault them.
"I'm going to use my wealth and power to negatively impact your life -- but don't talk about it, that's political." Nope.
As CEO I had already reorged Mozilla, and CTO was lined up for someone else (Andreas Gal). I was not offered any particular C level position by anyone with authority over such things.
I did not leave because of any of my employees objecting to me. If you are thinking of the handful of Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted on March 27th against me (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...), none of them worked for me. The Mozilla Foundation is arms-length from the Mozilla Corporation.
I also did not quit to pursue my own project; Brave was not founded until May 2015. I resigned to avoid Mozilla taking any more damage from mob action kicked off by someone who demanded that I be "completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla" (http://web.archive.org/web/20180621041436/http://www.teamrar... -- the blog seems broken but the Web archive has snapshots).
It's clear you just asserted falsehoods that make you comfortable. But you not only did not know what you were asserting to be true, you could not possibly know whether it was true. That's wishful thinking at best, and tantamount to lying at worst.
And FF should focus on the browser because this is their cash cow, and progress is needed. But as the declining usage numbers show, FF employes just do what they want, riding FF to death then jumping ship to raid the next project. As a longtime FF user (25y) you're just left in the dust.
They need an oversight committee (from outside the valley preferably)
Anybody got the breakdown on community commits to FF vs. employee commits?
Last time I saw anyone try to do this, it was vastly predominately employee commits (this isn't that surprising, there are hundreds of people working full-time on Firefox at Mozilla, and very few spending a comparable amount of time per day in the larger community); it's hard to get exact numbers because determining whether a commit is by an employee or not is hard (e.g., there's no requirement for employees to use Mozilla email addresses for their commits).
Current Firefox is better than ever for me.
I'm sorry you weren't around when Firefox (then called Phoenix) was really good, but most FF problems pre-date 2014. They are actually being addressed just about now.
When Eich was ousted it seemed like things took a sea change and we started getting "commercial" stuff shoved in our faces (alright, stuck on our toolbars). Firefox doesn't appear to be a high moral FOSS project trying to release us from the grip of commercial enterprise taking over the web -- as it did to me before. They went from being very user-centric to being a bit more like Microsoft (of old, at least): "we added a non-removable addon to /our/ browser", rather than "would you like to add this addon to your browser".
Now I've no idea if the removal of Eich's influence on "business philosophy" was behind that; could be a coincidence. But, either way FF seems to have changed for the worse IMO.
Mind, I'm still mourning the demise of Opera Unite -- with their browser as a server concept -- which seemed to be on track to change the focus of the web and give us the distributed peering that has always seemed to be the proper focus for the web+internet.
As a browser user I have nothing about political goals or making money, as long as the browser experience comes first.
Personally I feel like Firefox has made significant progress this year in particular. Mostly because of the performance improvements. I haven't noticed any 'spyware partnerships' and that would certainly concern me.