Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

Its not a new javascript engine. Its not a new rendering engine. So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser. It's the same browser with a slightly new UI. Count me as skeptical and unexcited. I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use. (Servo, by comparison…

I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago. I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in…

Is Vivaldi Open Source? https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but... Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package. In…

The UI is nice, but they keep referring to it as their "product" in the marketing material, so I'm not sure if it will become pay software at 1.0. Perhaps they'll sell the services around it, but they don't say anything, so it's hard to do anything but guess.