There is no need to "understand the hype", as a) there is none and b) it mostly comes down to personal preferences. When you're happy with your current workflow using other tools - that's totally fine, good for you. But, you know, there are people out there who are really looking forward to an alternative Browser-UI that 1) is very fast, 2) has a lot of configuration/features the others lack and 3) does not require you to install buggy/slow/tracking extensions for each and every single thing you want to change.

e.g. having a vertical tab list out of the box is great, even when it still lacks some nice features from Tree Style Tabs.

I use Chrome as my main browser and the lack of vertical tabs is about the only thing that really frustrates me. It's almost enough to switch to Firefox.

> 2) has a lot of configuration/features the others lack

Such as? I find it less customizable than Firefox or Chrome

Vertical tabs - lot of users want it, but chrome devs close the feature requests.

Ah, ok. They are however available in Firefox as an extension, aren't they? Or at least that used to be the case

I tried the Vivaldi version of this a few months ago and it unfortunately does not meet the feature set of Tree Style Tabs. It isn't a worthwhile alternative, for me.

Yes, they are available with the Tree Style Tabs extension

I'm yet to understand all the attention smartphones get. Perhaps there are users out there to whom it is appealing, but personally I don't see the need for the features they bring out like address books and instant messaging in the phone or taking photos. These are things I can already do using standalone applications or other devices. I would rather a phone be simple and most importantly reliable and fast.

That analogy makes no sense. "standalone applications" running on what? a non-smart phone? that would make the phone smart.

I think the humorous type of "standalone application" in this analogy would be a physical camera, a physical address book etc.

But right after that they say "or other devices". So my question is: Where is this standalone application, that can apparently do what a smartphone does, running on? It's apparently not an "other device".

I don't see you making a point that is relevant.

I thought it was pretty clear. Maybe I should have used "Swiss army knife" instead of smartphones?

The point is that Vivaldi is a toolbox. Some people like toolboxes.

I wouldn't say it's a toolbox, it's just another browser with some more sugar strapped to it out of the box. Coming back to your smartphone analogy, it's just another smartphone with more stock apps that many users don't want at all.

You mean like pre-built toolboxes have some tools many people don't really want? Good thing people can choose the toolboxes they find the most ideal, even if it contains only a hammer and a duct type and a lot of empty space, isn't it? :)

When Opera switched from Presto to Chromium, it was about as fast, but it was much lighter. Yet, almost every Opera fan/"customer" at the time was pretty mad. It was not because they were attached to Presto, but because of the huge feature depreciation. It's the features what made people use Opera until its 12th iteration, and some even use it today despite it having huge issues chewing through the bloat of JS on some sites.

If I recall correctly, Opera dropped even bookmarks at that point.

Yep! They brought that revolutionary feature back in about a year.

Yeah, they really stripped it down... at least it put an end to all the fanboy gangs who used to jump into any browser-related discussion, trying to convince everyone how Opera invented everything including tabs (it didn't invent tabs), and how other browsers are nothing but knock-offs that don't even have a torrent client built-in ; )

(No offense to Opera supporters - I used it on PC for a while and it worked very well esp. on slower machines, and I use it on Android to this day - but this was annoying like hell)

Well they were the first ones to implement it natively, by default and made it an integral part of their browser, and were successful with it. Of course they didn't invent it though. They didn't "invent" things like Dragonfly, Unite features, Turbo, etc., but I strongly believe the implementation is bloody good :P

But I don't count among those who call other browsers rubbish because they don't have some features. Personal preference and all that. However, I hate Opera Mini. It has little to no control. Not Mobile though! (if it still exists)

They were early adopters of tabbed browsing, I do give them that, but the first browser to have it was NetCaptor.

The whole idea of a browser as a swiss-knife internet suite (with an email client, torrent client, web server etc. all built-in) which was hailed as Opera's main strength back in the day, proved to be an evolutionary dead end - noone really followed that path, Mozilla had an enormous following, especially among geeks/superusers, and yet its SeaMonkey never gained traction, that does tell you something

I feel Opera hurted themselves by believing that this was what made their browser attractive. Probably overestimated that factor. As a user, I cared much more about whether eg. "Look into" on Amazon worked correctly (Opera - a few years ago when I used it - was the only major browser where it didn't).

Yes internet browsing still owes Opera much credit, they popularized a great many useful solutions such as mouse gestures, the product was very solid and ergonomical, I'm not questioning that. Plus it performed well on older PCs and slower bandwidths, which probably explains why it enjoyed tremendous popularity in Central and Eastern Europe (where I'm from)

The hype train was driven by old Opera enthusiast who long for full UI customizability and full _per domain_ configurability. Sadly Vivaldi delivers none of those, you cant even change mouse gestures :(

I personally think vertical tabs rule, and I remember them fondly from OmniWeb, but it's not something I would switch my main browser for.

I was introduced to them in Opera, but you can do it through extensions today. I use TreeStyleTab for example, and it's excellent.

The tab tiling is interesting, maybe it can be made into a chrome extension (I wouldn't bet on it though).