KGIII's Journal: Vivaldi - it's not that bad.

I've been playing with Vivaldi a little bit lately. It is a pretty interesting concept and one I've not really seen before. Much of it is written in HTML5, it's fairly easy to customize, and has a lot of interesting features. It is currently in the Technical Preview Stage, consider it more of a concept, and there are plenty of bugs but it's workable and has some traits not seen in other browsers.

Probably the most interesting one is that here, on this site, it matches the green color that is Slashdot. Yes, it's just colors itself like a chameleon depending on where you are. You can, it seems, also change the colors on your own but I've not actually looked into that.

It currently takes a bit of work to get extensions installed but the extensions from Chrome (and also Opera) should all work just fine with it. It's built on the same code base as Chromium. Which means it also inherits some of the Chromium problems. Currently, for example, there's no H.264 support for Linux users and the work-around for Opera probably won't work for Vivaldi.

There's no switch to disable hardware acceleration so you'll need to start it from the terminal until Chromium gets off their asses and gets that squared away (the problem is upstream). You can start it from the terminal with:

vivaldi --disable-gpu-compositing

Give it a shot. You might find it interesting and, as it is still early in development, you may be able to help guide them into crafting a browser that meets your needs. Also, they're giving away free webmail but, really, who doesn't already have enough webmail accounts available? I can only assume that it will support POP3 and IMAP later in life.

What say you, Slashdot? Can we screw it up beyond belief? Yes we can! Seriously, give it a shot. You might find it an interesting browser. I'll keep playing with it for now.