[rplnt]

I'm glad there's something. Chrome simply sucks[1]. Firefox is complicated[1], and even if you invest time, there are too many things wrong[1]. There's not much else (as in different).

I tried Vivaldi many times over the last year, and my conclusion is that I find it unusably slow. They take direction I like, but they chose technology that is bad (but cheap). Maybe it will get better, I surely hope so. Another nitpick of mine is that it uses WebKit (or whatever it's called now) and I hate using that.. but I do... because browser market (and perhaps web itself as a result) is in a really bad state.

What makes it different (and better in my eyes)? It's a browser usable out of the box, without any extensions. Not to say there shouldn't be any extensions, just that the basic functionality and configuration should be there.

1. For me obviously, personal preference and all.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

For me, apart from the slowness, the problem is the non-nativity of it all... for example if you enable the menu bar, click on an entry (e.g. tools) and then move the mouse left or right, that entry remains selected. In standard menu bars (at least on Windows), when you go left or right you navigate through the menus.

I'm used to all these little features of the native interface and if you remove them, my productivity suffers.

Also, no MDI. Although at least the devs did a good job including the "click current tab to go to previous tab" option. 80% of my use of MDI in classic Opera was to do that.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Also try Otter Browser ( http://www.otter-browser.org/ ). It aims to replicate the feature set of old Opera, with the same idea of being usable out of the box, and it doesn't use as slow a technology as Vivaldi. It still is lacking some important stuff (such as passwords manager) but it's actually progressing at a very good pace considering it's practically a single-person FOSS project.

On the other hand it's also Webkit-based at the moment, because everything seems to be... the architecture is multi-engine though.

[rplnt]

I follow them as well (mostly by idling on irc and posting major releases to reddit; I don't contribute). It's a nice project. Though I don't particularly agree with their priorities (i.e. recreating complete Opera 12.x).

For me Opera wasn't great because it had bundled irc/torrent/mail clients. I couldn't care less about those. It was great because it was stable, fast, small, memory efficient. No other browser was even close at that time (2012 they neded iirc?). Had all the things you want - content blocker, ui/input customization, great tab/window management, "inspector",.. and I don't even know what else anymore :)

I don't think Otter will be able to achieve many of those. Partially because it uses webkit and is in no place to maintain its own fork.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Well, I didn't care much for torrent and email in Opera 12, but they didn't bother me either, as they didn't seem to spend any resources when they were not used. Even with torrent, email and IRC, Opera was still the fastest and most lightweight browser around by a mile.

The thing with Opera features is that each user had their own pet features. In fact, when Opera released the new Chrome-based versions, removing lots of features, they claimed that those features were not used by the vast majority of users (an example was bookmarks which they claimed was unused by more than 90% according from their survey data). And it may very well be true, but the problem is that each particular feature was used by a different minority, so they upset a lot of users even if for different reasons for each user (in my case, menu bar, MDI and "click tab to minimize" were some of the biggest ones, other people don't care about these but loved tab stacking which I always turned off, etc.)

In view of this, even if I didn't use all Opera's features, I think trying to implement the full feature set is a sensible goal.

For the record I think the bundled clients, at least IRC and torrent, are quite low priority in Otter anyway.

[V-2]

> Well, I didn't care much for torrent and email in Opera 12, but they didn't bother me either, as they didn't seem to spend any resources when they were not used.

That's true, but they surely spent their resources on developing these extensions. In hindsight, this wasn't such a good bet. Case in point: noone else did that, and this approach is rather outdated now.

[rplnt]

Not entirely true with the email as it was also (or only I guess) used as RSS reader by many people.

[V-2]

So-called "superusers" are probably overrepresented in your circles (as in mine), and thus your point of view is kind of skewed ;) Ask your family members or people on the street, an overwhelming majority of regular internet users won't have a slightest clue what an RSS reader even is

[piyush_soni]

Just curious - for you, personally, what makes Firefox complicated? Just want to know people's reasons about what makes software look complicated.

[rplnt]

Firefox itself isn't. But configuring the UI and getting some functionality in is. (Some) extensions are huge bundles of functionality, affecting things all over the place. It's not a fault of firefox, but firefox caused it by not having very basic functionality built in (namely tab ordering, cycling, ...).

Then there are frustrating things like how do I move the reload/stop button to the left? Why do have quite powerful UI customization when it doesn't allow such a simple operation?

[piyush_soni]

Yeah, IIRC, you used to be able to move the Reload/stop button. They stopped supporting it for some reason. I use add-ons for other tab related things that affect me.

[bwat48]

How exactly is firefox 'complicated' ?