Browser Vivaldi - the latest news and announcements

Hello!

It has been several days since the release of the first public test version of the browser Vivaldi . Naturally, the developers did not rest on their laurels (and nothing else: as the project founder Jon von Tachner said “Everything is just beginning”) and actively corrected the bugs found by users. But about this - a little later, and to begin with a few words about the results.

And the results showed that the old Opera is still remembered, loved and appreciated. And as soon as the browser appeared, which decided to revive the good old days (but at the modern technological level, of course) - it immediately became the focus of attention. It did not go without curious "surprises". For example, if Russia, which always differed in its warm attitude to the former Norwegian browser, quite logically became the leader in the number of users who visited the Vivaldi.net official site on the first day of the Vivaldi browser’s public life, then the United States appeared in second place margin) can be called unexpected:
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However, for the Vivaldi team this did not come as a big surprise - after all, we initially opened an office in the States too, and the preparation for the American audience for the appearance of the Vivaldi browser was done the most serious.

It turned out even more interesting with the attendance of the official website of the browser - vivaldi.com . Here on the first day we received almost 220 thousand visits from 206 countries! At the same time, the USA was even among the leaders - bypassing Russia with a small margin:



However, the situation has changed very soon: Russia today is confidently leading both on vivaldi.net and vivaldi.com, almost a third ahead of the United States. In total, at the moment, the total number of visits to the official website of the browser vivaldi.com has already exceeded 700 thousand and continues to grow. You, of course, ask about the number of installed browsers. But here I will keep silent modestly: Jon von Tachner, as the founder and leader of the entire project, should publicly voice such figures. I can only say that this figure is significantly six-digit today :)

But enough about the boring - it's time to move on to more interesting topics. For example - to the question of how users can tell developers about the errors found (of which there are, of course, a lot more). There is good news here, and not so much. I'll start with the good one: you can now send bug reports using the special form on this page . It looks like this:



Given that I speak only in Russian in a company, I need to send bug reports in English. As for the news from the category of "not very", it lies in the fact that there will not be an open bug tracker. I understand that this is not the “trick” of the old Opera, which many would like to see in the new browser, but at the moment we don’t have the opportunity to serve the open BTS - we simply don’t have enough people. However, we are discussing how the process of fixing bugs can be more open to Vivaldi users.

In the meantime, the developers do not sit back and correct the bugs you have already discovered. Just an hour ago, I tested a fresh internal build, and I can report that the bug with closing the browser window before closing the settings window has been fixed. Also corrected and errors in the processing of single-keyboard shortcuts, which led to a spontaneous movement of the tabs or change the scale of the page when entering text. At least in the Linux version, which I always test. In addition, many other bugs were fixed, but you can learn more about it after the next public browser build is released. When? Yes, very soon - early next week. And if someone else does not know: we plan to release test builds weekly . So we hope that the process of fixing bugs will be quite visual, almost in real time.

Now, regarding your wishes, recommendations and suggestions for improving the browser or adding old / new features. This is also a very important task for us, so we began collecting your feedback and suggestions on the official forum. You can leave your wishes both in English and in Russian .

I will answer in advance the question “why you will not collect wishes from Habr / another blog / another forum”. Moreover, I have already received such a question on one of the forums. Of course, when creating a voting roll (and I plan to make a list of requested functions for voting after some time), requests from other forums and blogs will also be taken into account. But there is one nuance. On the Internet, dozens of branches are being created with a discussion of Vivaldi. Some developers know and go there, some do not know at all. Thus, we are simply not able to collect all the wishes all over the Internet and add them to the lists. It is unreal. But there is an official forum, where we are always, and where it is most logical to collect wishes, will you agree? After all, this is a resource specially created for interaction of developers with users. No software developer will scour the Internet in search of what is said about its program on forums and blogs. The developer creates a special resource and works exclusively with it. I think this is a very reasonable and logical explanation.

And another news - from the category, of course, good. From the first day, users began to explore the internal structure of the browser Vivaldi for the fact that there you can pick it up to make the browser of your dreams. Some people quickly wrote a patcher to replace the browser's default background image with their own, someone simply manually edits the files , removing unnecessary (on his glance) interface elements (good interface is written in HTML), and as in the good old days, trying to make my improved translation of the browser interface (by the way, I started it from 2003 when I became an Opera user).

In fact, this is great and brings us back to unforgettable and wonderful times when users had power over applications, and not vice versa, and when there was a huge scope for creativity that allowed them to discover new talents and abilities. Here we have with you complete, as they say, harmony: we like it no less than you. There is, however, one inconvenience: when updating the browser, the results of your manual labors will disappear and you will have to repeat the whole process again. But I can immediately rejoice: we are actually preparing quite impressive staffing tools so that you can change the browser on your own and at the same time all your changes would be saved when updating Vivaldi. I have already said this and am ready to repeat it again: one of Vivaldi’s top priorities is to make a browser that gives users the greatest possible freedom in setting it up and changing its appearance. And we are not going to give up this goal.

This is all the news. Next week, wait for the next test build from us. Great weekend to everyone!