Vivaldi Is A Slick New Browser For Internet Addicts

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/vivaldi-is-a-slick-new-browser-for-internet-addicts/

...Speaking of Settings: there’s lots of them. In addition to customising the appearance, you can also manually set keyboard shortcuts for almost any action. There’s also a privacy panel, which helps you manage cookies and site data reasonably easily. Other tweaks include a built-in option to disable images, a ‘content blocker’ (which seems to be an ad blocker, more or less), and all sorts of options to change the appearance of webpages. (Ever wanted to view Gizmodo in black and white? You can now.)

In speed terms, Vivaldi is on par with Chrome, the browser I normally use day-to-day (unsurprising, since it’s built on the same rendering engine). However, with identical tabs open in the two browsers, Vivaldi uses significantly less RAM than Chrome. No doubt some of that is to do with the lack of extensions in Vivaldi, but the clever interface coding — which mostly uses Javascript and CSS — probably doesn’t hurt either.

The technical preview is available for free, for Windows, OS X and Linux. It’s probably not quite a full-fledged alternative to the popular browsers yet — lack of extensions, more than anything else, is stopping me from switching — but it’s a neat step forwards.

[White Stripes]

the team that spun off of opera software after opera stops using the presto engine in favor of the chrome platform.... uses the same platform to compete.... um... what the hell happened to presto? and opera for linux for that matter... last version of that -is- the last version that uses presto...

[Pri]

They abandoned it because they don't have the financial freedom to maintain their own rendering engine anymore. Now they can just focus on the UI and associated user features and leave the underpinnings to someone else.