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by skrebbel 2561 days ago
I really love Vivaldi's features and how they're designed/UX'ed.

But I've had to move away from it, back to Firefox, because it was simply too sluggish and weird right where it matters.

Like, I'm never entirely sure whether a page is loading. Is my connection bad, or is Vivaldi in a weird lockup state? I mean, the latter is totally imaginable. I've had pages suddenly render entirely white, while stuff is still clickable (i.e. the mouse becomes a hand icon when I move over where I expected to see buttons). I had to copy the url into a new tab and all was good again.

Quirks like these compared with the slight slowness of the UI make Vivaldi feel like a pre-iphone smartphone. I wish they would address this.

I don't even think I'd need for the UI to be much faster - I'm ok with a slightly less snappy UI in exchange for all the power user features (and the speed with which Vivaldi has been adding them). But you have to improve the visual feedback. Little loading spinners can get you a long way. Don't just freeze stuff. When I click "stop", make the stop button become the reload button immediately again. Show proper error pages when stuff goes wrong, I don't mind, I can reload. Ditch the limbo states.

I truly wonder whether the Vivaldi team actually uses Vivaldi. Or maybe they all use enormously powerful 32 core workstations on amazing internet? C'mon guys, fix your browser. It's worth it.

3 comments

On Windows the new tab experience feels very sluggish for me, although I don't use Vivaldi as my main browser so can't comment on the rest. Chrome, by comparison, feels completely smooth and instant. Firefox is a touch slow compared to Chrome but noticeably better than Vivaldi. It's such a small thing but trying to move away from Chrome it was the first thing I noticed and it still irks me.
For me it's one of the snappiest (on Linux mint / i7 / 16GB). I changed to Vivaldi about year ago and it's the first browser ever which isn't constantly slowing down with time and I'm not constantly thinking should I change again.
Hm! Maybe it's all Windows specific then. That's a pretty polar opposite experience you got there.
dunno where you get that, for me Vivaldi is better than chrome and firefox, along with providing decent ux (ie addons firefox used to have)

fireefox is complete garbage now, its not any faster and the ux is absolute shit, and no more decent addons to fix it.

and I use vivaldi at work on a piddly 2core 2.4ghz laptop..so wtf are you running vivaldi on to be saying its sluggish.. total bs