WetGeek

I've talked with Von Tetzchner and some of the staff at Vivaldi. I really think Jon is immensely underrated. Not only did he give us Vivaldi but he built Opera as well. Vivaldi was established as the direct desire to change the direction that Opera ended up going to.

At the end of last year I became a brand Ambassador for the browser. I really believe in the mission and values of the company. Jon is giving up a huge amount of profit by focusing on keeping the Vivaldi company one owned by the employees.

They have an excellent community as well. Their forums are extremely busy and well-moderated. Also if you sign up for a Vivaldi webmail account it comes with your own blog. The blogs made by the Vivaldi Community members are what some of what make up the Vivaldi.net homepage. It is powered by Wordpress and is a nice and simple alternative to paying for hosting if anyone wants to start a small personal blog

      jrsilvey I throw myself for a loop all the time regarding communication this last year. maybe i missed the mark as well! 🙂
      EDIT: jrsilvey I've loved reading RMS in the past regarding foss philosophy, but I want retract my full love status and Walk it Back. I was made aware today of '03 and '06 blog statements he made concerning a taboo subject that I cannot reconcile with myself. While I respect his pioneering work I no longer stand by my fanhood.

      I was out of the loop on that one.

          WetGeek

          WetGeek As I've mentioned in this forum before, I even prefer Vivaldi to Edge on my computers that sometimes run Windows 10. I suspect that linux users' infatuation with Edge will be a short-lived one. It's new, interesting, and hard to get, but that won't last forever.

          I think you are right. The blinking-lights crowd will play with Edge and lose interest. It is a good browser but not materially better than Firefox and other Linux-available multi-platform browsers. The users who want to avoid the Microsoft ecosystem won't use Edge at all, just as users who want to avoid the Google ecosystem won't use Chrome. The folks who will use Edge are OS-ambidextrous users who have one foot in Windows and the other in Linux, particularly employees of businesses that are standardized on Edge. That's not a large number of users.

          Vivaldi is a superb browser, but I can't use it because it isn't available on iOS. I don't need to use a browser to access the internet on my iPhone very often, but when I do, it is because I need to access the internet right then and right there. I understand the technical reason why Vivaldi elects not to support iOS, but that doesn't change things.

                tomscharbach

                The fact that Vivaldi isn't on iOS is because Apple has a requirement that any browser in the iOS App Store run on the Webkit platform. Releasing an iOS version of Vivaldi would require an entire rewrite of the browser and that is the only thing preventing it from being added.

                I would love to point out that Vivaldi is available on Mac OS and is being released on the new ARM based M1 Apple computers. This is a fairly new thing you might not have heard!

                It is a shame too.. Vivaldi on Android is brilliant. I did not have any faith that the features available on the desktop would ever make it to a mobile platform but I was wrong.. Sync brings over all your Notes, synced tabs, Bookmarks, etc. The Vivaldi Notes feature alone has completely replaced OneNote for me. The Screenshot feature is freaking awesome! (Although I hate to admit this that I use the Budgie Screenshot App for everything.. it is superior to Vivaldi's Screenshot app -- but only because Budgie works outside of the browser!)

                I know this doesn't fix anything but maybe at least it helped you use the browser on another platform you have access too!

                    jrsilvey

                    jrsilvey The fact that Vivaldi isn't on iOS is because Apple has a requirement that any browser in the iOS App Store run on the Webkit platform. Releasing an iOS version of Vivaldi would require an entire rewrite of the browser and that is the only thing preventing it from being added.

                    As I said, I understand the technical reasons**, and I accept Vivaldi's decision that the work required to make Vivaldi available on iOS is not justifiable on a cost/benefit basis, given the iPhone's relatively small (15% or thereabouts) market share. But that decision takes Vivaldi out of the running for me.

                    jrsilvey I know this doesn't fix anything but maybe at least it helped you use the browser on another platform you have access too!

                    But why? As you understand from my earlier comments, I base technology decisions on functionality and practicality. Vivaldi is an excellent browser, but it isn't enough better than Edge or Firefox to entice me to ignore a threshold requirement, which is that the browser sync bookmarks/favorites across all the platforms (Android, iOS, Linux and Windows) that I use daily. Absent a compelling reason to do so, it is neither functional nor practical for me to regress a decade to the days when I manually kept browsers in sync across platforms. Any benefit I'd gain from Vivaldi would be outweighed by the cost of manual syncing.

                    =================

                    ** Because the browser engine would change from Blink to Webkit, Vivaldi would have to rework the UI and external control elements of the browser to adapt them to the Webkit engine.

                          jrsilvey The Screenshot feature is freaking awesome! (Although I hate to admit this that I use the Budgie Screenshot App for everything.. it is superior to Vivaldi's Screenshot app -- but only because Budgie works outside of the browser!)

                          I don't use Vivaldi Screenshot tool. I wish the Budgie Screenshot had more features, like annotate image before upload, gif support, etc...

                            4 months later

                            Will Edge allow us to view vudu.com content? Currently their DRM restricts Linux users for all browsers I've tried. I've even tried agent spoofing and they still see I'm using Linux somehow and block content. This is the only streaming site I have issues with. Supposedly Edge was supposed to fix this. Really don't want to install an MS product at all unless I know it's going to work🙂

                            Thank you!

                              zmaint Will Edge allow us to view vudu.com content?

                              The last I heard vudu for Linux relies on Flash. Microsoft Edge (as is the case with most mainstream browsers) no longer supports Flash. So probably not.

                                  5 days later

                                  tomscharbach I'm honestlynot sure what they're using. Something changed in March 2019 right before they sold to Fandango. Prior to that, worked fine no issues. Now all I can see are the ads, but the video just says playback not supported. I've tried Brave, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Vivaldi, all same issue. Even with spoofing it still gives same error.

                                      zmaint Now all I can see are the ads, but the video just says playback not supported.

                                      I went to the boards for a few minutes this morning, and discovered that is issue is the topic of quite a number of discussions. Reading the boards, the issue seems to go beyond Linux (Windows users seem to be having the same issue), so my thought about Flash was probably a dumb thought. The boards put forth any number of possible explanations, but all of them seem to be speculation. I have no idea. Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem to affect Roku. It seems beyond stupid that Vudu would abandon the browser audience, but that seems to be what has happened.

                                          tomscharbach Thanks for going the extra mile🙂 I've opened dozens of service tickets with them since it changed, and also with Fandango, and their usual response is to just use Windows. Which is not helpful and not an option lol (If only more people actually read the EULA...). If I figure anything out I'll share here.