Furthermore, there is little reason to suspect Vivaldi might become major. It brings nothing substantially new on the tech side - it's using Blink, like Chrome and Opera, and like Opera, it only differentiates itself from Chrome on the UI side.
Many browsers have differentiated only on the UI side; none have really succeeded. As another example, Flock.
The 4 actually major browsers have all brought major new innovations: Firefox was a different rendering engine than IE (and much better in pretty much every aspect, except legacy website support); Safari launched with WebKit (a new major fork of KHTML with many improvements); Chrome in turn launched using a major fork of WebKit (bringing process isolation and a completely new JS engine, v8).
Vivaldi brings nothing like that to the table. It's interesting to see new UI ideas, of course. But for the article to call it "the first new major browser in many years" makes me immediately wonder if the author doesn't own Vivaldi stock (which of course is not the case; but the point is that it seems unjustifiably positive on the product).
Firefox was an innovation compared to IE, but it was explicitly a trimmed-down version of Mozilla, which had existed in the form of Netscape going back what amount to geologic eras in terms of the history of the Web.
Firefox's innovation wasn't the rendering engine, per se, but everything surrounding it, including add-ons.
Many browsers have differentiated only on the UI side; none have really succeeded. As another example, Flock.
The 4 actually major browsers have all brought major new innovations: Firefox was a different rendering engine than IE (and much better in pretty much every aspect, except legacy website support); Safari launched with WebKit (a new major fork of KHTML with many improvements); Chrome in turn launched using a major fork of WebKit (bringing process isolation and a completely new JS engine, v8).
Vivaldi brings nothing like that to the table. It's interesting to see new UI ideas, of course. But for the article to call it "the first new major browser in many years" makes me immediately wonder if the author doesn't own Vivaldi stock (which of course is not the case; but the point is that it seems unjustifiably positive on the product).