I'd be curious to see a comparison of this with the "big 3" (Chrome, Firefox, IE). And playing devil's advocate, why bother to make yet another browser?
I don't really have fragmentation concerns because it's basically Chrome with an Opera-like front end. I did a benchmark comparison and they were roughly equal, with Vivaldi winning some and Chrome winning some.
I'm liking it so far. If you aren't crazy about Chrome's UI, it's worth a shot. Hope to see more privacy features, but right now the settings are the same as in Chrome.
Given the browser is one of the most used pieces of software, and we increasingly live our digital lives in to, the more competition the better. When was the last time you saw significant innovation in a browser? It seems a while, and I dont believe we're run out of things to improve. More competition is awesome.
And dont forget competition encourages the big browser companies to work together to maintain interoperability, not branching off to 'their software' trying to create a competitive moat or simply because they want to push the world in one direction with monopolistic power. If people have options it stops this typically negative behavior happening.
Unless I am missing something. We have seen some major improvements and innovations in the browsing world from major competition even since Chrome entered the market.
Your definition of innovation might be different, but both IE and Firefox have gone through major changes for the better ever since chrome entered the scene.
I guess this comes to ones definition of recent. Chrome launched 8 years ago - how fast time goes! I dont know how closely you followed browser news at that time but there was a constant fight for features and faster browsing in the few years before/after that launch. And it's not like nothing has happened since that time but it does seem to have slowed significantly the last few years. I'd love to see that passion return to the wider market. There must be so many features we cant even think of that will become 'how did I live without that' yet invented for such a core piece of software category.
Major rewrite and redesign takes time even for the world largest software company, in the past 8 years or so both MSFT IE and Firefox has gone through major rewrites in their js engine, rendering engines and UI. Chrome on its part forked webkit so that they can make changes and add feature faster, which was not possible before.
Making browsing and maintaining your own rendering engine is not easy which is why we don't have a lot of competition in the this market.
I think it's good to make another browser. Trying to improve on existing things benefits everyone. Just downloaded it, it's got some nice touches I've not seen in other browsers.
I'm liking it so far. If you aren't crazy about Chrome's UI, it's worth a shot. Hope to see more privacy features, but right now the settings are the same as in Chrome.