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If you want to contribute to Vivaldi, you can do that in a number of ways:
1. Share with your friends. Help us grow.
2. Utilize the included search partners, with which we have deals. Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia and Yahoo. We do not have deals with Microsoft and Google, unlike our competitors.
3. Use our included bookmarks and direct match partners.
4. Donate.
We are fighting with Big Tech and they want us gone. You can make a difference.
@jon I didn't know you have a deal with those browsers. So basically, I search via them on Vivaldi and that's it? Cool.
@sharan , yes, we have deals with these search engines, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Yahoo. If you use them as default in Vivaldi, that will generate revenue for us.
@jon Alrighty, time to head back to the Duck.
@jon as a happy Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo user, an honest question: Don't all those search engines also use just Bing or Google and pay them in return? Does a truly big-tech independent search engine actually exist?
@flooper , there are various attempts going on. The latest is this one:
I think it is important to get alternatives for sure. Big tech needs competition. I also think it is important to support browsers and search engines other than the Big tech ones, even though there may be some reliance on Big tech even for them.
Building another rendering engine is too much work. We did that at Opera and it was the best engine around, but sadly Opera killed it after I left. There is a lot of complexities there that most would not understand.
There is not a lot of alternative engines out there and I do not think it would be worth the effort to try to be compatible with another engine. We modify Chromium. It is a lot of work to maintain that. Doing that with more than one engine is just not feasible and would not bring us anything.
If we treated the rendering engine as a black box, we might have been able to do more, but that is not what we do.
@jon I’m following the Servo.org project from the side, so I’m well aware of how much hard work this is.
Still, thank you very much for your thoughtful answer.
At the moment, I’m still on Firefox, with a heavy use of Containers. Before that (some 3 years ago), I came from Chrome with multiple profiles. Much more difficult setup.
Does Vivaldi has something similar (upcoming) for session isolation?
I think one has to realize that when building a browser from scratch is too much work for Apple, Google and Microsoft, it is too much work for most everyone.
At Opera we had a unique team that had worked on the codebase for up to 20 years. We knew what we were doing. I think Opera could have continued to work on Presto and should have, but starting from scratch is another thing.
A lot of it is related to how things work on the Web. It is not enough to implement the standards. You also need to be compatible with others. Even if you are, you may still be blocked from accessing services. We are being blocked even today, which is why we have to ID as Chrome and not Vivaldi.
With regards to containers, we do not have that today. On the other hand, you may well find out that the other features we have, such as Workspaces and tab stacks, make up for that. It is also very easy to have multiple instances of Vivaldi running. Standalone installs are a powerful tool.
@jon I've always been a fan of Opera back in the Presto days, but even I acknowledge that as great as it would be to see the engine getting licensed and brought back up to modern standards, even that much is still quite the undertaking
@elfi , indeed. We had a team of 100 working on Presto when I left Opera. My estimate at the time was that we would need to add 10% to the team each year to stay competitive as the requirements kept expanding. This was with a team that knew the code well, had written it and were highly skilled. That code has not been maintained now for more than 12 years.
Anyone that works with programming knows it is not just a question of adding a lot of people to the team. Trying to do 10 years of work in one year with 10 times more people is not feasible. The effectiveness goes down as the team grows as more time is spent on other things than coding and nobody understands the whole code anymore.
A lot of time is also needed to harness the code and that is done over time.
@jon I remember that the only search engine that wouldn't provide revenue for Vivaldi was Google. I switched to Bing to support you guys. Now I'm trying DuckDuckGo. It has a nice AI Chat untracked anonymous feature: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/aichat/
@FearlessJuan , yes we no longer have a deal with Bing.
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(he/him) @jon Except you're built on Google's Chromium, so anyone using your browser is further entrenching Google's monopoly in the browser wars. I get *why* you chose Chromium, but don't act like you're anti-big-tech when your browser does, in fact, further entrench Google's power.
The reality is that most all browsers today are built on Chromium and I do not see that changing anytime soon.
I have built a browser from scratch before. Opera. Sadly, after I left, Opera ditched their own code.
There is no option for us not to use Chromium. There just not is. It is also a pretty good code.
There is a reason why Big tech wants us gone. If you want to support them, that is your choice.
@jon I don't get "Direct Match". Not the name, and not the way it got pushed. It got auto-enabled after last patch, which was basically a way to sneak in sponsored search results, which were irrelevant to my search. My first thought was that my browser had been compromised. If the goal was to garner interest & trust in the sponsor partners, this wasn't the way.
DIrect match is not new. It has been in there for quite some time. I guess it is the first time you see it.
We are trying to find a balance where we provide you shortcuts to sites you might want to visit, while generating a little revenue for us.
We have had the same principle for bookmarks since the beginning, but people did not like us editing their bookmarks, so this was an alternative, less intrusive way to suggest sites to visit.
@jon
Greetings!
I am a fan, what can I say, I'd been using Opera since it had ads, 8.5 afair, till the last presto version 12.18 became unusable and the standalone mail client way longer than that.
Obviously I jumped on Vivaldi right when I found about it. I am very happy that you recreated old Opera functionality (and then some), because that's what I wanted to get.
I love the mail client for its different paradigm - don't do folder filtering, instead use contacts + real time full text search. I had a very heavy business mail account 2005 - 2010, it was so fast in Opera, by the time my oultook colleagues found anything in their mail I was long done & gone making coffee. It was sad to watch sometimes.
One thing I miss is aesthetics. Opera had a very elegant UI (at least till Vista showed up with its fake glass). I udnerstand Vivaldi goes for 100% pragmatic look determined by technology and it's fine i guess. We could do way worse but I yearn for times of chunky icons and bars full of 3D buttons when we were young.
Also, features for tab hoarders on withdrawal (highlight duplicates in windows panel, highlight the same domain, stack duplicates etc).
Anyway I work in IT and install Vivaldi on most machines that come through my hands.
@ilpalazzo , thank you for your kind words and support.
Have you tried looking for a theme? Pretty sure you can find one with the look you want!
@jon but can i reduce resource usage when i am streaming with OBS on Twitch? I have not had an answer in this, so have not switched over.