New Vivaldi release for Windows, Mac & Linux.

[jon@social.vivaldi.net]

@dallo @ed

At Opera we had the largest team of any company engaging with writing the Web standards we all use today. There are some guys working on Chromium today that are former Opera people, but sadly they do not work for us.

We can contribute more and have more of an influence with a larger company. Currently we spend a lot of time just modifying and improving functionality, but we are not getting much of our changes into Chromium. We hope to change that, but first we must grow more.

[tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud]

@dallo@pouet.chapril.org @jon@vivaldi.net @ed@livellosegreto.it considering Chromium is a Google project made by mostly by Google, i dont think some downstream can really influence them at all

[dallo@pouet.chapril.org]

@jon @ed alright good luck with that.

[csolisr@hub.azkware.net]

@jon @ed It's reasonable to stick to a well-tested engine, as long as you make sure that upstream doesn't start deprecating vital functionality (like Manifest v2). In that regard, do you have any particular blockers that stop you from releasing the source code for the rest of the application? I can't trust myself to put my personal passwords in a browser that may or may not be secretly funneling them elsewhere, and relying on Ghidra and Wireshark to verify it is suboptimal.

[dataknightmare@mastodon.xyz]

@jon as long as you avoid "AI", I'm in.
(WTF is "AI" doing in _anything_, in the first place, is beyond me)

[kaleissin@wandering.shop]

@jon Just got a very enthusiastic demonstration of what is possible with the new tiling, time to upgrade!

[sandropisano@mastodon.uno]

@DataKnightmare @jon Hi Jon. Great work at Vivaldi. Here we appreciate so much your work and your browser. Please consider every day about use of AI. I (and a lot of people here in Italy!) don't want any of this f*ked chatbot in my browser. So keep going on, I will share to every my friends about this.

[dallo@pouet.chapril.org]

@tragivictoria @jon @ed Well Jon think they can

[castaway@fosstodon.org]

@sesav because its awesome! (Switched from Opera back in the day, never looked back) - keeps adding useful/usable features which FF + Chrome then add later ..

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@jon "While other browsers add AI summarization and Edge pushes Copilot integration, Vivaldi 7.8 ships features users have actually requested"

🧑‍🍳💋

that's so delicious 😋

[mraptronym@mastodon.social]

@jon recently switched and quite happy with everything so far.

A point I haven't seen others make is the first start-up experience: Optional account; letting me know about the feed reader, calendar .etc without pushing it; customization with a couple suggested themes and tab placement without being overwhelming...

Plus you can just x out at any point and use the thing. It was a really good experience!

[saschadiercks@mastodon.social]

@jon That is a really awesome release and proves one more time, we are on the right browser!

[taylor@social.axfive.net]

@ariarhythmic @jon It might or might not be, but this is effectively a technical product promotion blog, and those already sounded like this. A lot of the hallmark AI writing red flags are things that were already very commonplace in product announcements and technical memos: bullet-points, fluffing the reader, an overly-optimistic tone, em-dashes (a sad casualty of LLMs now—em dashes existed before LLMs and I won't give them up), "Not only X but Y", etc.

For what it's worth, I see plenty of things that indicate that this is probably not AI-written. There are a couple sentence fragments where an LLM would probably have elected to use a comma or semicolon, like this one: "Compare prices, monitor live data, reference documentation, all without breaking flow. Whilst Chrome and Edge’s split-screen is locked to two tabs. Vivaldi supports unlimited, flexible grid layouts." I'm pretty sure it's not LLM-generated.

[taylor@social.axfive.net]

@jon A little surprising that you're taking potshots at browser AI features and didn't throw any shade at Firefox. I'm still a Firefox user, but they probably deserve a little bit of shame for their latest decisions.

[wheaty73@social.vivaldi.net]

@jon liking the easy window tiling in this version!

[lisp_1@social.vivaldi.net]

@jon I still wish there were a way to break away from Chromium.

[jon@social.vivaldi.net]

@lisp_1

Here is the thing. Chromium came out of Webkit. Webkit came out of KHTML. A strong Vivaldi can influence Chromium, I am sure about that. I think that is a more realistic route at this time and I hope people will support us on this route.

At Opera we had 100 working on Presto. 100 people with experience and skills. I believe Opera should have added about 10 to that team yearly to stay competitive. Instead they killed it. This was the best codebase at that time as it was all written from scratch and optimized. Building something like that today is just not going to be easy and that is something we do not have resources to do as it would require a much larger team today and it would take a long time to do. Instead we can gradually have team members work on Chromium and get our stuff into that codebase.

[lisp_1@social.vivaldi.net]

@jon Well, I hope you take over Chromium. We can let you sail the ship.

[lisp_1@social.vivaldi.net]

@jon Is it possible to remove all traces of Google from Vivaldi?

[amusiklotz@social.vivaldi.net]

@jon @sesav

I am an (almost always) happy user of Vivaldi. I work online a lot and intensively, and Vivaldi is incredibly powerful and efficient once you get to grips with it.
This browser is actually a complete office suite—and I am still a long way from using **all** the features it offers.

And yes—I'm quite adept at AI, but please refrain from adding unsolicited services to my suite of tools.
When I utilize AI, it will only be when I initiate it myself.

In my opinion, Vivaldi is almost perfect. Except, of course, for scrolling across a vertical tab list. The resulting website tempest is not for epileptics!