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diff --git a/elementaryos-review.txt b/elementaryos-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c117c09 --- /dev/null +++ b/elementaryos-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown. Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux everyday even if we don't know it. + +Despite its ubiquity, for most people there remain only two kinds of "computers": Windows and macOS. + +Linux is, at best, that "other". That's a same because there's a wealth of Linux desktops out there +If that describes you, I have a solution for you: elementaryOS. + +ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top its Daniel Fore and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set. + +As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Fore decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born. + +ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to it's revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, no one on the original team that launched 1.0 had much experience in PR, and blog post about the pay what you want model rubbed a lot of people in the community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it the fact that an elementaryOS blog post essentially called people who did not pay for the software they used thieves. + +When I spoke with Fore he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model ElementaryOS established early on has succeeded. + +Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependant on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS. + +And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developer's in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing. + +## ElementaryOS 5 Juno + +The latest release of ElementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5. + +Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style essay of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on. + +One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. According to Fore, it's an upstream problem. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from its recent data collection tk is that Ubuntu users need better virtual machine support, which is now in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS and Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine. In the mean time though, testing elementaryOS means installing it. + +The elementaryOS installer is brand new in this release and very well done. Previously elementary relied on Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which, while it works, failed to do one important thing that the new installer does well -- set elementaryOS's unique tone, look and feel of elementary right from the start. The new installer is a collaboration between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing PopOS as well. + +The installer will walk you through the process of installing elementaryOS alongside your existing Linux distro (or, presumably, Windows and macOS, though I didn't test this). I went ahead and installed it on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all look really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen. + +Once you've got elementaryOS installed you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop, which, while GNOME-based, is very much its own thing. Like GNOME is has a top bar, but that's about where the similarities end. The top toolbar shows the date and time, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless, as well as an application launcher. ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen. + +In fact, elementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired. But in Juno I'd say that's less true than previous versions. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which is I think why it gets the macOS comparisons. + +Another possible reason some users find it to be macOS like is its lack of customization options. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS and little way to customize the apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak it. + +That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which messes with my 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use `gsettings` to change the button layout. In other words, little tweaks are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps. + +Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS. + +Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the epiphany web browser, tk and tk. + + + +One thing that surprised me about Juno was the attention to keyboard shortcuts. My desktop of choice is i3 because it's very lightweight and I can do everything with the keyboard, while elementaryOS is not lightweight (compared to i3), it does offer a wealth of keyboard customization options. I was able to duplicate all the keys I use in i3 in elementaryOS. + +## The AppCenter + +## Rough Edges + +AppCenter shortcomings, no Gimp +no customizations + + + + + + + + + + + + +ElementaryOS also ships with a lot of Apple hardware drivers, which makes it a pretty good option to install on Apple hardware. As long as the Apple hardware doesn't have that new T2 chip which (as of November 11, 2018), which currently blocks Linux bootloaders. diff --git a/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt b/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt index 1b08d25..d4f5f15 100644 --- a/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt +++ b/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt @@ -1,6 +1,8 @@ Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. -If you've been following the Linux world at all you know that Canonical ceased to develop its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server and the dream of "convergence", a unified interface of Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. The change comes almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop. Contrary to what quite a few reviews have said, this is not the first release of Ubuntu to use the GNOME desktop, which makes this release more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. +If you've been following the Linux world at all you know that early this year Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server and its larger vision of "convergence" -- a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. + +Almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop the distro is back to GNOME, which makes this release more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. That said, Ubuntu 17.10, does very much feel like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases -- you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure there'd be a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood, but by and large the Ubuntu's Unity 7 desktop was in maintenance mode for several years. @@ -14,7 +16,7 @@ Desktop users paying close attention to Ubuntu may not like the renewed sense of In a [blog post](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1518) announcing 17.10 Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth encourages users to "pick a desktop". "we're using GNOME", he writes, "but we’re the space where KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others come together to give users real and easy choice of desktops. And if you’re feeling boned by the lack of Unity in open source, you might want to hop onto the channel and join those who are updating Unity7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 18.04". -The last bit hints at the future of desktop Ubuntu. So does a recent call for community input on a new Ubuntu desktop theme. These hints point to a new Ubuntu desktop, one that's much more community-centric. Canonical got rid of most of its design team so in one sense it has no choice but to farm these things out to the community, but that's not the entire story here. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that Canonical's course reversal on "convergence" goes much deeper than just abandoning Unity. Canonical shows signs of also abandoning its sometimes rather rigid belief system as well. Gone are the days when feature requests were dismissed as "wont fix" simply because they conflicted with some designers vision of how the desktop should work. +The last bit hints at the future of desktop Ubuntu. So does a recent call for community input on a new Ubuntu desktop theme. These hints point to a new Ubuntu desktop, one that's much more community-centric. Canonical got rid of most of its design team so in one sense it has no choice but to farm these things out to the community, but that's not the entire story here. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that Canonical's course reversal on "convergence" goes much deeper than just abandoning Unity. Canonical shows signs of also abandoning its sometimes rather rigid belief system as well. Gone are the days when feature requests were dismissed as "wont fix" simply because they conflicted with some designer's vision of how the desktop should work. Instead I believe that Ubuntu realized its mistake wasn't just pursuing convergence, but that convergence wasn't what its users wanted. I believe that the new Canonical, the new Ubuntu, is going to listen more closely to its community. I also think that the desktop release will eventually be spun off as a community-driven product only loosely affiliated with Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth has already said Canonical is prepping for an IPO, hence the focus on money-making uses of Ubuntu -- embedded, server, etc. If that happens the desktop will very likely slide to the side. There's plenty of prior art here, think Fedora and Red Hat, OpenSUSE and SUSE. That's not necessary at bad thing. In fact it can be a good thing. Keeping things separate allows the desktop to develop and grow largely independent of Canonical's bottom line. @@ -24,24 +26,31 @@ This is a major release for Ubuntu not just because it's a brand new desktop exp The Unity desktop is gone, rather it's "available in the archives," which is to say it's gone for all but the diehard fans looking for an obscure cause to get behind. Instead Ubuntu 17.10 boots in to GNOME Shell by default. +[image="ubuntu-gnome-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 17.10"] + The first time you log in to 17.10, you'll notice that it doesn't look all that different from the last release. Ubuntu's developers have put considerable effort into making GNOME cosmetically similar to Unity. Unfortunately, in some important ways, them similarities are only skin deep. Much of Unity's appeal was in the small things that greatly improved its usability relative GNOME, for example the keyboard-driven HUD, the global menu, the nice notification system and several other innovations present in Unity are also "available in the archives", which is to say, gone. -How much this matters to your experience with Ubuntu 17.10 depends on how much you used anything of these things and how well GNOME plugins can mimic them. Let's start with the bad news: if you were a heavy user of the HUD features in Unity your transition to GNOME will be painful. There is no GNOME plugin to pick up the slack (there are some admirable efforts underway, but in my testing none of them were ready for prime time). Worse, this is the kind of feature request that will have you hounded right off the GNOME developer mailing list so don't even bother. GNOME will never have a HUD, undo your muscle memory and move on. Or stick with Ubuntu 17.04 until it reaches end of life in 2022. +How much this matters to your experience with Ubuntu 17.10 depends on how much you used any of these things and how well GNOME plugins can mimic them. Let's start with the bad news: if you were a heavy user of the HUD features in Unity your transition to GNOME will be painful. There is no GNOME plugin to pick up the slack (there are some admirable efforts underway, but in my testing none of them were ready for prime time). Worse, this is the kind of feature request that will have you hounded right off the GNOME developer mailing list so don't even bother. GNOME will never have a HUD, undo your muscle memory and move on. Or stick with Ubuntu 17.04 until it reaches end of life in 2022. If the HUD wasn't your go-to tool in Unity then the transition to GNOME will be less painful. In fact most of what unity could do can be imitated with GNOME plugins. Want Ubuntu style notifications and indicators? There's [an extension](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/) for that. Want a Global Menu? There's [an extension](https://github.com/lestcape/Global-AppMenu) for that as well, but alas, it doesn't really work. Want a *working* Global Menu? Ubuntu 17.04 is for you. +[image="ubuntu-gnome-search.jpg" caption="Searching in GNOME is a little different than Unity"] + Still, Ubuntu 17.10 is at least visually similar to its predecessors, which helps smooth the transition to GNOME somewhat. And since Unity was built on top of the same GTK libraries, GNOME components and GNOME apps as, well, GNOME itself, most of the apps and interfaces you'll see and need to find in Ubuntu 17.10 are either identical too, or very similar to their Unity counterparts. -In some cases though even the familiar will feel a little strange. Files, the default GNOME file manager app, is a good example of this. For Unity 7 Ubuntu used an older version of Files and heavily patched it to add some functionality that had long since been deleted by the GNOME developers. With 17.10 Files is up to date and those features are gone. One thing that Ubuntu did manage to hack in there is support for the desktop as a place to put stuff. The GNOME developer apparently consider the desktop just a wallpaper display tool, but Ubuntu you can actually put launchers, folder and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. +In some cases though even the familiar will feel a little strange. Files, the default GNOME file manager app, is a good example of this. For Unity 7 Ubuntu used an older version of Files and heavily patched it to add some functionality that had long since been deleted by the GNOME developers. With 17.10 Files is up to date and those features are gone. One thing that Ubuntu did manage to hack in there is support for the desktop as a place to put stuff. The GNOME developers apparently consider the desktop just a wallpaper display tool, but Ubuntu with you can actually put launchers, folders and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. + +[image="ubuntu-gnome-files.jpg" caption="Ubuntu 17.10 features the latest version of GNOME Files"] + +The top bar in GNOME behaves a little differently than the top bar in Unity. It has app indicators, status messages, network controls and user sessions like Unity, but also adds a different app menu, a calendar applet in the center of the screen. There's also something like a global menu, minus the menu. When apps are maximized the name of app appears in the top menu, along with a one item menu -- quit is generally your only option. A couple of apps have few extra items in their menus -- Terminal and Files for example -- but it's a far cry from Unity. -The top bar in GNOME behaves a little differently than the top bar in Unity. It has app indicators, status messages, network controls and user sessions like unity, but also add a different app menu, a calendar applet in the center of the screen. There's also something like a global menu, minus the menu. When apps are maximized the name of app appear in the top menu, along with a one item menu -- quit is generally your only option. A couple of apps have few extra items in their menus -- Terminal and Files for example -- but it's a far cry from Unity. +[image="ubuntu-gnome-topbar.jpg" caption="The GNOME topbar menus (composite screenshot)."] -There's one other thing you'll notice in this release, the window management buttons back to the right side of each title bar. Back when Unity first arrived Ubuntu moved the buttons to the left (or wrong) side of the window in the name of innovation. Actually they had a pretty good reason, when you made a window full screen in Unity the buttons because part of the top bar and you can't to that when buttons are on the right side. But with the unified top bar a thing of the past there's no reason to have the buttons on the left side. If you really liked them over there you can change the setting in the GNOME Tweak tool. +There's one other thing you'll notice in this release, the window management buttons are back on the right side of each title bar. Back when Unity first arrived Ubuntu moved the buttons to the left (or wrong) side of the window in the name of innovation. Actually they had a pretty good reason, when you made a window full screen in Unity the buttons became part of the top bar and you can't do that when buttons are on the right side. But with the unified top bar a thing of the past there's no reason to have the buttons on the left side. If you really liked them over there you can change the setting in the GNOME Tweak tool. Once you get past the differences with Unity however there's much to like about this release. GNOME Shell is different from Unity, but it's not necessarily worse. It's certainly a pretty desktop, especially if you swap out the default theme that ships with 17.10 for something a little sleeker (I happen to like the dark variant of the Arc theme), something Ubuntu itself is planning to do before 18.04 LTS arrives. The default GNOME apps are generally the same as what you had in 17.04, though, as noted above, some are quite a bit newer (Files and Terminal are the most notable of those). -For those already well familiar with GNOME, Ubuntu 17.10 ships with GNOME 3.26, notable for its improved, streamlined -search view, a new settings app (called Control Center rather than Settings) and full text search support for Files. There's also an interesting feature buried in the GNOME Web app, the GNOME browser no one uses. It now supports Firefox Sync, which means you can sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs between Firefox and Web. So if you want to see what Web is like, now you can at least do it and keep everything you've got set up in Firefox. +For those already well familiar with GNOME, Ubuntu 17.10 ships with GNOME 3.26, notable for its improved, streamlined search view, a new settings app (called Control Center rather than Settings) and full text search support for Files. There's also an interesting feature buried in the GNOME Web app, the GNOME browser no one uses. It now supports Firefox Sync, which means you can sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs between Firefox and Web. So if you want to see what Web is like, now you can at least do it and keep everything you've got set up in Firefox. In the end what you get with GNOME in 17.10 is close enough to Unity that it doesn't take more than a couple of days to wrap your head around the differences and get on with your work. @@ -57,7 +66,7 @@ It's worth mentioning that the 32-bit installation image is no more. Ubuntu prev Ubuntu 17.10 includes the Linux kernel 4.13, which has some fixes for SMB-related security vulnerabilities, initial support for Intel Cannonlake chips, some 3D support for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA drivers, Thunderbolt improvements, along with the usual slew of odds and ends updates, patches and improvements. -The server edition of Ubuntu 17.10 has a host of new features for sysadmins and developers, including tk, tk and tk. +The server edition of Ubuntu 17.10 has a host of new features for sysadmins and developers, including the latest kubernetes (now at 1.8), the latest release of OpenStack, updates for most languages (Python 3.6, Python 2 is gone by default, still in the repos though), and LXD 2.18, which has a slew of bug fixes and minor improvements for container deployments. ## Alternatives @@ -71,4 +80,4 @@ These features are available in three of MATE's many panel layout options -- Mut Ubuntu 17.10 is a huge departure for Ubuntu, but one that sees the distro seemingly getting its footing back. The transition to GNOME, while not without its pitfalls for some users, is surprisingly smooth. Unity did have some features you won't find in GNOME, but Canonical has done a good job of making things familiar, if not identical. -More important than individual features in 17.10, this release sees Ubuntu getting starting over to some degree. The long development process of Unity 8 was threatening to turn it into Godot, but now Ubuntu is free of Unity 8 and it's users no longer have to wait for anything. +More important than individual features in 17.10, this release sees Ubuntu getting starting over to some degree. The long development process of Unity 8 was threatening to turn it into Godot, but now Ubuntu is free of Unity 8 and its users no longer have to wait for anything. diff --git a/vivaldi2.html b/vivaldi2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..36181e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/vivaldi2.html @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +<p>The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it.</p> +<p>Despite their ubiquity though there is very little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other?</p> +<p>But this uniformity is a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard. </p> +<p>Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to <em>our</em> will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone.</p> +<p>You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the <a href="https://vivaldi.com/download/">Vivaldi site</a> or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS.</p> +<p>Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened. </p> +<p>The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.</p> +<p>But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi.</p> +<p>If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying.</p> +<h2>Vivaldi 2.0</h2> +[image="vivaldi-stock.jpg" caption="Grab the latest version of Vivaldi and this is the first things you'll see."] +[image="vivaldi-stock-color.jpg" caption="The default Vivaldi theme matches the top bar color to the color of the site you're on. As with everything else in Vivaldi, you can change this in the settings panel."] +<p>Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature.</p> +<p>Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs. </p> +<p>Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of its focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house.</p> +<p>While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works.</p> +[image="vivaldi-sync.jpg" caption="Vivaldi's new Syncing feature and settings"] +<p>Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more.</p> +<p>As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority.</p> +<p>In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which forced Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process.</p> +<p>Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs", this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?).</p> +<p>This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisit those previous reviews. In my <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/even-at-1-0-vivaldi-closes-in-on-the-cure-for-the-common-browser/">review of Vivaldi 1.0</a> I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar.</p> +<p>I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version. </p> +<p>After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-2-0-your-browser-matters/">Vivaldi blog</a> for more details, and the complete list of <a href="https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-1-15-to-2-0/">everything that's new in 2.0</a>.</p> +<p>My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to view several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it.</p> +<p>In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions. </p> +[image="vivaldi-tab-tiles.jpg" caption="An example of how tab tiles can be useful. On the left is a map of bus routes, on the right is the street view of what I'll see when I get off the bus."] +<p>Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Web Panels. Web Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and the panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying.</p> +<p>Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again.</p> +[image="vivaldi-panel-resize.jpg" caption="This is the old behavior, the main browser window is resized to accommodate the panel."] +[image="vivaldi-panel-float.jpg" caption="Same window, same panel, but now in floating mode. Main window content is unchanged, panel float above it."] +<p>I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it. </p> +<p>Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens. </p> +<p>One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it. </p> +<p>In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most. </p> +<p>I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the <a href="https://devdocs.io/">devdocs</a> site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way.</p> +[image="vivaldi-web-panel.jpg" caption="Looking up things in Django's documentation (via DevDocs.io) while reviewing code, a handy use for Web Panels."] +<p>This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features.</p> +<p>For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it.</p> +<h2>How to get the most of Vivaldi</h2> +<p>That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users."</p> +<p>To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions.</p> +<p>The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. </p> +<p>To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet. </p> +<p>As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like it to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcuts Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right.</p> +<p>That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software. </p> +<p>Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching. </p> +<p>Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well. </p> +<p>Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off.</p> +<p>In Vivaldi you get more control than that.</p> +<p>The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested.</p> +<p>If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions. </p> +<p>You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo.</p> +[image="vivaldi-search-settings.jpg" caption="Granular control allows you to balance privacy with convenience when searching the web."] +<p>You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo).</p> +<p>It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab.</p> +<p>You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suit your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on. </p> +<p>The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the <a href="https://forum.vivaldi.net/">user forums</a> for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know.</p> +<p>In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved.</p> +<h2>Conclusion</h2> +<p>While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power user's delight.</p> +<p>When I asked why a tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage lies in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours."</p> diff --git a/vivaldi2.txt b/vivaldi2.txt index c25e0e6..6859d39 100644 --- a/vivaldi2.txt +++ b/vivaldi2.txt @@ -1,37 +1,110 @@ -hen it comes to privacy, metadata is a huge leak, using Vivaldi or brave then becomes a kind of fingerprint +The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it. -Why should a tech savvy user switch from Firefox? +Despite its ubiquity there is little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other? -It's about the focus on you and your requirements. Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours. +But this lack of choice is itself a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard. -It's not about going public, not about getting rich, it's emplyee owned. +Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to *our* will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone. -Future: Privacy side. +You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the [Vivaldi site](https://vivaldi.com/download/) or install it through your OSes' app store or package manager. -Tell me a bit about 2.0 +Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened. - maturing the browser - focus on details +The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69. -my fav features: +But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi. - resizing dual panes +If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying. -There is no user metric tracking in vivaldi. +## Vivaldi 2.0 -Internal is where the big features come from , details come from users +Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature. -Forums, right +Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs. -Sync is anonymized, use a password, data is encrypted end-to-end, +Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of it's focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house. -2.0 is bigger release with Sync and a lot of details. +While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works. -backporting security. +Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more. -It's faster -- part of Chromium, part Vivaldi refactoring to keep up with Chromium, found of bottlenecks +As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority. -There is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users. +In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which force Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process. +Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs, this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?). +This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisiting those previous reviews. In my [review of Vivaldi 1.0](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/even-at-1-0-vivaldi-closes-in-on-the-cure-for-the-common-browser/) I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar. +I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version. + +After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the [Vivaldi blog](https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-2-0-your-browser-matters/) for more details, and the complete list of [everything that's new in 2.0](https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-1-15-to-2-0/). + +My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to viewing several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it. + +In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions. + +Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Panels. Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying. + +Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again. + +screen resize +screen float + +I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it. + +Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens. + +One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it. + +In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most. + +I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the [devdocs](https://devdocs.io/) site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way. + +This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features. + +For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it. + +## How to get the most of Vivaldi + +That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users." + +To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions. + +The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. + +To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet. + +As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcut Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right. + +That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software. + +Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching. + +Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well. + +Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off. + +In Vivaldi you get more control than that. + +The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested. + +If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions. + +You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo. + +You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo). + +It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab. + +You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suite your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on. + +The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the [user forums](https://forum.vivaldi.net/) for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know. + +In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved. + +## Conclusion + +While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power users delight. + +When I asked why tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage likes in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours." |