With the most popular browsers looking and working more or less the same way, it's refreshing to see someone trying to bring something new to the table.
I'm on arch right now so I'm going to download and edit in a minute! Edit: Installing it as a hassle -- sooooooooo many dependencies, and a lot of them from git so it took a while to download the big ones (and I'm on a pretty decent connection). That said, it's pretty barebones, for now. When you open it there's just a page with an address bar in the middle, and typing into there takes you where you want to go. It'll either do a search for what you type or go to the address. There's no address bar at the top of the page you're viewing, but in any page you can press TAB and get a little HUD with the aforementioned tree history view and an address bar. Overall, it's pretty, but not that functional as of yet. Certainly not revolutionizing, but it's pretty and I'll probably check on it every once in a while. Edit2: crashed when I tried to view a .swf file on it. Edit3: Ok it crashes quite a lot, at least on my machine.
Still hyped for Vivaldi! The browser brags with its visual appeal and as NoTroop mentioned, I'd rather see this as an addon for an existing browser. There's way more important stuff to a browser than how it looks or how it represents tabs. Vivaldi has only been in development since late January this year, it's not even beta yet (Technical Preview 3), and I'm super close to replace my Firefox already. They regularly release snapshots with a lot of new stuff and/or enhance the existing stuff. Beta is soon (tm) to be released, most likely it will have Opera's (<= v12) old integrated mail system and synchronization between clients.
Yeah, that's true, you'll find way more info on the browser in the patch notes etc. on the blog. Maybe they start promoting it more when it's beta? Just as the old Opera, it comes with a full package if you want to register. Mail, some webspace, maybe a blog, forums, etc. But if you just use the browser, you won't really notice any of this stuff and don't have to use it. The second part is what they're advertising or promoting on their main page currently.
As I wrote in the other post, the main information about the browser is currently still hidden in the blog. Behind the browser is, if you register and decide to use it, some 'community' stuff like a blog, a free email, photo sharing/webspace. Just as the old Opera used to (or still does?). Currently you really notice that it's based on Chrome in the backend, but the thing that makes it different from other browsers is the team behind it. If you check the blog you will recognize a lot of familiar faces (if you were into Opera sub 12) and that generally stands for innovation and reliability. This is why the browser already gets so much media attention. Guess where Tabs come from? Opera. Speed dial? Opera. Integrated mail? Opera. Pop-up/ad blocker? Opera. Tab stacking? Opera. Customizability is heavily encouraged and the developer try to make it possible for the consumers. Last snapshot they integrated a setting to scale the whole UI, a feature that I wanted for my Firefox for ages but I had to look for minimalistic skins instead, which were broken in the UI remake the other patch. If you press CTRL + Q or F2 in Vivaldi, you already have a neat new feature that is not existing in other browsers, and it'll help you to surf/navigate your browser more quickly. They already have tab tiling in the client, which allows you to split the view of the browser for two or more tabs and browse them at the same time (I've used that for reddit-streams.com in one tab and the stream in the other tab for example, or to surf and compare prices/features of articles) A lot of 'hardcore users' (which is the target audience for Vivaldi as well as Opera <12) have a lot of faith in the team to deliver innovation and awesome stuff, and in the past they delivered. As I said, I prefer Vivaldi already over my Firefox, and Vivaldi is in development for less than 5 months. For the beta there are high hopes for sync and mail being integrated and each snapshot has more awesome stuff in it, and they get released every 1-2 weeks. They're catching up pretty fast already and have stuff that other browsers don't have. Is the browser for you? I can't say, the target group is not the casual user who goes on google to search something, then on YouTube to watch 3 clips and go offline again. Those people won't notice a lot of difference and might be more content with old and familiar settings/environments. But if you have 20 tabs open and your hobby is surfing the web up to 6 hours a day or more, then yeah, you should definitely keep an eye out on the browser and check what the team created this time. Also, of course it still has some rough edges, since it's not even beta, but so far it's running smoothly.
I'm currently using Vivaldi. Basically the only thing that differs it from other browsers I used is the navigation bar. The navigation bar has your bookmarks, vivaldi mail (coming soon), contacts, downloads and notes. The browser is also more customizable than what I'm used to. I doesn't have a proper plugin system yet so you will have to add plugins via the chrome store for now.
Agreed. The Session Saving and Autocompletion already supported by current browsers, and Tracks can surely be implemented as a add on. Also, some screenshots would be awesome.
I guess the browser does look kinda shinier and unconventional in certain aspects, including the history tree. But I don't see any specific features that give it functionality that's unheard of in most other popular browsers. Let's see how the project matures first before calling it revolutionary.
The title is obviously hyperbolic, I don't actually expect "Rainbow Lollipop" to become a threat to Firefox or Chrome any time soon, but it could perhaps be the next Opera - somewhat obscure, innovative, the browser of choice for power-users and hipsters.