Vivaldi browser v1.8 released, with calendar-style browsing history
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
In fact, this is probably the reason I like Tree Style Tab[1] so much. Instead of a simple list, it shows my tabs in the context I opened them from.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
The tails project experiments with this in Servo and browser.html:
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919
You create a browser extension that adds the GA pagetag to every site you visit. Have the Client ID isolated by tab, but persist from one domain to another, so every tab is reported as a different "User." Then you can use the Behavior Flow reports to see the next-page/previous-page/next-domain/previous-domain data for everything you viewed!
This of course has the enormous caveat that now all your browser history is setting in a Google Analytics account, instead of just only on the browser. But considered Congress just allowed your ISP to sell that data anyways, maybe that's not such a big drawback anymore?
http://www.ghacks.net/2014/11/14/firefoxs-interest-dashboard...
> The extension is no longer supported however.
Sad. Unfortunately that's all too common...
It's interesting that many businesses (and probably governments) have better access to a user's browsing history than the user.
I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited.
Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.
I've often thought about trying to re-implement some of their ideas with a local caching proxy or a browser extension. If there's an open source attempt at this already, I'd love to hear about it.
Other use cases that I have are:
* I want to be able search all content & comments of HN submissions that I have either upvoted or saved.
* Want to search all the content of items saved in Pocket
I looked around a bit and didn't see anything about the license on their site. If I missed it and someone has a link that would be appreciated!
I've tried it out and it seems nice and powerful.
Yes I know they publish some source and no I don't use Chrome - for the same reason.
Best of all, it's open source: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/LICENSE....
Using your analogical line of reasoning, the equivalent would be stealing the groceries from a supermarket and replacing them with your own. I don't think Brave's proposed (but apparently never implemented) ad-replacement was quite this bad, but analogies are never very accurate.
I buy the food (content) and get the branded packaging (ads)
I then serve the same food, replacing the branded packaging with my own plates.
My dinner guests will give me credit for the plates, instead of giving eyeballs to the original branded packaging.
The fact it took a second explanation/clarification is a pretty good insight into how accepting we've become of advertising as a thing tbh.
It's my understanding that they replace them with ads from their own network, but revenue still goes to the publisher.
You're right that this is "problematic", but your initial description of "Brave replacing ads with their own", while technically correct, leaves out any subtlety. They might me misguided, but this doesn't looks as malicious...
Brave blocks ads by default it does not replace them.
Edit: formatting
Cars without the very very very best armour are completely unsafe. Don't use this nice, good, performant, practical and mostly bulletproof van, instead settle for the google armoured car because think if someone starts shooting at you with a 50 cal sniper rifle from a perfect angle!
PS: for extra goodness the hood of the google car is welded (closed source even if we know the engine from chromium), pulling trailers (real extensions) is not possible and by default it records your every turn of the wheel and sends it to Google because you never know...
PPS: Oh, at close range even the google car yields to a sniper rifle.
Me: happily using Firefox. Happily driving a reasonable family car. There are certain places I won't drive that car at night but I can live with that.
(Feel free to bookmark and reuse. : )
Also- I think you vastly underestimate how often people get hacked through their browser.
As a seasoned IT pro I should know. Yet in the last 20 years I was hit by a drive by exploit once.
Other people: tons of times.
By some weird coincidence this seems to be the same people who insist on trying to run the latest crack of Photoshop etc.
I do explain to people that just as there are certain places you won't go at night there are certain places they shouldn't necessarily visit on the Internet.
Other than that it is tech support scams, driver update scams etc, but not many drive by exploits on places I frequent (HN, occacionally dzone, reddit and slashdot, technical blogs, mainstream and not so mainstream (both very correct and somewhat uncorrect ones) news in my language etc.
Browsers are free.
> pulling trailers (real extensions)
Well look what's happening to Firefox's extensions soon.
> PPS: Oh, at close range even the google car yields to a sniper rifle.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pwn2own-2017-microsoft-edge... - Although the statement "Firefox was back at this year’s Pwn2Own after missing last year, seemingly because the browser would’ve been too easy to hack" probably sums it up nicely.
Browsers are free.
Using Chrome would cost me a lot. Both because it is sub-par for my usage patterns and because it feels bad to support it.
Well look what's happening to Firefox's extensions soon.
Last I checked whey will still be miles ahead of every other browser.
"Firefox was back at this year’s Pwn2Own after missing last year, seemingly because the browser would’ve been too easy to hack" probably sums it up nicely.
Pwn2own is the equivalent of lining up cars and inviting people to bring their preferred weapon to test the armour.
As I have pointed out elsewhere either I am unusually lucky or drive-by exploits are way less common in the wild than people think. Or maybe it is just because I don't go hunting for Photoshop cracks and free movies with my work browser.
In any case: Yes, the safer the better, but we need to stop this "nothing but the most secure" mindset because in the end it only results in a Chrome monoculture which I think is worse in every way, even securitywise.
Doesn't change the fact that your analogy is flawed.
> Last I checked whey will still be miles ahead of every other browser.
Vimperator maybe, but that stopped working a while back.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/mozil...
Still, they're moving. And why do you think they're moving?
> Pwn2own is the equivalent of lining up cars and inviting people to bring their preferred weapon to test the armour.
I agree with you, but I was responding to your comment about a sniper rifle. I'd argue that pwn2own is the equivalent of using a sniper rifle - and Chrome seems to have dealt with it well.
> In any case: Yes, the safer the better, but we need to stop this "nothing but the most secure" mindset because in the end it only results in a Chrome monoculture which I think is worse in every way, even securitywise.
Like I said, I'd been using Firefox for years because I honestly think it's a better browser. That doesn't excuse how far behind they are security wise though. They seem to have the resources with the companies they've been acquiring but IMO they (the resources) are misplaced.
I much prefer open source, and on my home Arch Machine I use Chromium but at work I'm required to use Windows so I use Chrome because otherwise it's awkward.
Once Mozilla gets sandboxing implemented I will be moving back to Firefox.
As someone who put a lot into the old pre-12 Opera community, I will never use a closed-source browser again. This is not a commentary on quality - Opera was hands down the best browser ever built, despite being closed-source - but rather on commitment. If Vivaldi fails, all of its users will be left out in the cold. Again.
Admittedly, it is not quite so bad a situation as Opera 12. Vivaldi is mostly/largely open source[2]. It still seems like a massive missed opportunity though.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-01-12-P...
[2] https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...
Isn't the way out of this via open source and community efforts essentially why Firefox has been successful despite not being OS bundled or backed by a huge search engine company like Google?
Firefox definitely does benefit from community contributions (a lot), but the vast majority of the important code is written by paid employees.
I don't think GP has any issues with Vivaldi being developed by paid developers per se, but if Vivaldi Technologies decides to stop development there is no guarantee that anyone else will be able to take over development. Firefox wouldn't have that issue if it started today.
I don't disagree that it would be better if Vivaldi were open source. I just don't think that reason is all that compelling to Vivaldi the company. Who thinks about "what happens when my company folds"? There are other advantages to being open source than just that.
How come? Is there an upside to this I'm not seeing?
Rather than the idea of "happier to have my car stolen, etc.", it's more, I'm happier to be the guy who rides the train rather than the bus. I don't know exactly how the train is operated (even if I know the concepts that make it work) - my knowledge extends only so far that I know that it does what it's supposed to. I'd go so far as to suggest that relatively few rail transit riders do know how to properly operate a train - and add to that, trains can only run on rails; i.e. they do one thing well (generally speaking - let's not discuss the number of issues NJTransit's had recently). The potential for hijacking is significantly reduced by inherent limitation and obscurity of control.
So too do I want software along that same thought process. Relatively few users know how to do more than what they need to know; and even so those that would hijack it are locked into a specific set of operations.
Most humans want trains to be safe (A). Some humans are lazy fucks and will risk hurting people or deliberately hurt them to save time and make money (B). Some humans know a lot about how trains work (C). Most humans don't know much about how trains work (D). Some humans don't know anything about how trains work (E).
A train is an object that operates at normal scales, in multiple senses. It is very natural for the state of the safety of a train to be observable to its users. They would know if its rusty and unkempt, if the doors weren't put on properly, if the engine is making unusual sounds, if the conductor looks shady and may be there to scam them. Group D may not know exactly how the train is going to kill them, but you don't need to be in Group C to recognise most design failures. The safety of trains is ensured in part by the size of Group D, operators (Some C, Some B) won't make enough money if Group D refuse to ride the train so they keep standards high.
Now software isn't quite the same as trains. Software has nearly everyone, like yourself, nearest to Group E. Group D is not insignificant - these are those who work with software at a design level, and can spot design faults. Group C are minuscule.
Closed source software means that the only ones checking Group B are the members of Group C who have, for whatever reason, gone the extra mile. Group D are as oblivious as E.
Open source software allows Group D to get involved in checking that the operators are more of Group C than Group B.
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Your busses vs trains scenario is interesting. Trains are controlled by widely available and auditable schedules, making them more open than the untracked antics of the completely closed source reasoning of bus and car drivers.
I don't think it's fair that you were downvoted, but this is an idea that developers and IS professionals tend to disagree with [1]. Even detractors don't feel that higher code availability correlates with lower levels of application security.
1 - https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2004/10/the_non-sec...
Being able to use code blocks from FOSS projects makes a developer's life easier, rather than consistently reinventing the wheel. It also allows for more code to get out the door, faster. So whether they're paid on salary so they can just browse GitHub (or SourceForge, etc) for the code they're looking for, or paid by project so they want to get things out quick, it's beneficial to have many open source projects across the entire ecosystem of computing.
Being able to review source makes an IS professional's life easier, because rather than testing the I/O of a black box (which is often time-consuming), they can look over "important sections" of the (often human-readable) code. With something like Notepad++, they have code indentation and highlighting, and can search for key phrases to identify those "important sections" which often show some kind of major security hazard. This means that they get more projects done, in turn being able to make more money.
So when you look at the situation from a "cui bono?" ("who benefits?") perspective as a relative outsider, those two groups of people who are most strongly in favor of open source are the two groups which are most likely to benefit from it. As such, I consider their statements subject to bias, whether conscious or not!
Given the last few years of adventure in the OpenSSL land I make no assumption about superiority of the open sourced solutions security-wise. Hence the curiosity, what is the motivation of others.
I wouldn't have a clue what to do with browser code, and I don't inspect the code of the browser I use, but I am happier if people who can understand the code and who aren't dependent on the project for their living can check it.
This feature looks nice and I hope other browsers adopt and adapt and make more meaningful end-user advancements like this that are visible to the eye.
OK performance is nice to have but frankly I think that's just managers shoving resources at that because they know how to measure it and a 10.3% increase in speed or memory efficiency or something is easy to sell in a meeting.
UI innovation is much harder to quantify, requires more work to sell, and the payoff takes much longer to manifest, not least because every change will generate a certain number of complaints from people who think their pet issue should have been addressed first, like UI designers are interchangeable with performance specialists.
Chrome shot to first place because it kicked Firefox's ass on performance and IE's ass on reliable rendering (an opinion which you may or may not agree with). But while extensions are wonderful they can't and don't replace core UI innovation. And tbh I'm really bored with Chrome at this point; from a user point of view nothing significantly new has happened for a really long time.
Look at the bookmark management, for instance. It's been the same since forever, and if I want to socialize that information or turn it into a feed or something I have to go looking for third-party solutions, which are thin on the ground because people are reluctant to develop too much for a platform over which they have little or no control.
However its full potential is not ready yet, since Firefox has been migrating to WebExtensions, and this has not fully stabilized yet. Long term I think the WebExtensions move also makes sense, since it gives extension authors a stable API to work with, instead of XUL which can break with each Firefox update. And the architecture makes it easier to optimize threading performance and some form of security sandboxing.
So the point is, I think more UI experimentation is on Firefox's horizon, but they have to first stabilize the technical architecture before they can go full throttle on that.
"Boy howdy do normal users have hard time with non-conventional browser interfaces!" https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino-pro...
I think that that's a little paranoid. There's just little demand for a revamped history tab. I like this change a lot, but it's certainly a case of not knowing I wanted it until I saw it.
Chrome will often offer the first result as a search query, instead of a website I visited before. Feels very clear that it's a big part of their business model. Firefox is much more aggressive in serving history URLs. If I type "videos" in Firefox, it will give me "reddit.com/r/videos" as the first result, since I've been there plenty of times, but Chrome insists on offering the first result as a generic Google query for "videos".
Related sidenote, Firefox was also way superior in remembering which letters I type to go to which site in a more broad way. Chrome does it on a very basic level, prioritizing the sites that have the same string on the top level domain. Example, if I type "news" Chrome is always going to offer me sites that begin with "news" such as "news.ycombinator.com", even if I more often end up going to "randomsite.com/news" or "randomsite.com" whose page title is "News!" when typing that. Firefox remembers my preference, which means that after a few days of Firefox use, I'll have a bunch of 2 letter combos that take me to the exact site I want ("ne" to Hacker News, "vi" to reddit videos, "ap" to an apartment listing website which has "ap somewhere deep in their URL, or just in the title of the website, etc.), while Chrome will only give me top level URLs, and feels as useless on week 10 as it did on week 1. For sites where I don't remember the URL, I'll usually end up googling the page title in Chrome, while Firefox would serve me exactly what I need from history.
Part of all of that is just shit UX on Chrome's part, but it's a safe bet that shit UX drives significant revenue for Google.
I remember the ridicule Mozilla got when they introduced the "awesome bar" (doesn't look like they're still calling it that), but it really did turn out pretty awesome. It replaces both bookmarks and history for me -- which is incredible if you think about it, those are both two very heavyweight interfaces.
It also makes using Chrome very frustrating, since I keep entering keywords that I know Firefox would have indexed (such as a ticket number in a bugtracker), while Chrome sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.
As Henry Ford apocryphally said, 'If I had asked people what they wanted they would have told me to bring them a faster horse.'
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recoll-indexe...
The one complication I found was ensuring that I blacklisted sensitive websites such as banks.
I'm sure there are security/privacy trade-offs. Storage is not such a big thing. I found that index size leveled off somewhat after a point. It probably would use enough storage to make it unreasonable for mobile browsers.
This would be a good additional feature for Pinboard perhaps (which I've been intending to subscribe to for ages but never get around to).
It would be a good feature for the deluxe Pinboard subscription. As long as you're mirroring the content, you might as well index it with Lucene or something.
I guess my point is that this probably appeals to a very small subset of users, but it seems like a massively over-engineered solution for the majority of people, and feels a little bit like the result of trying to answer the question "What can we do that's different?" with a "Wouldn't it be cool if...", rather than solving problems that people genuinely face. Am I being unfair?
My read on the philosophy of Vivaldi is that it's deliberately developed for the minority of users. It's a reaction to the trend of browser features tending towards a generic middle.
They make take it too far (developing features that 1 or 2 users want), but it's still somewhat refreshing to see anyone set out with that kind of mindset.
From my own perspective, I can't quite decide whether I'm not a power user because this feature doesn't much interest me (which I'm fine with), or whether it would interest me more if I actually tried it; I guess I am interested in the product journey that led to this being built, because it is clearly a large amount of effort for a - to me - quite unusual tent-pole. Likewise, for me, it's hard to see a doughnut chart of "Link transition types" as anything more than a novelty that you would look at once and then hide.
I'd like to believe that it's not, but my humble observation is that it ends up being so. A friend just told me that it has to do with economies of scale. I never liked economics anyway.
On a technical level, it has to do with complexity. By reducing it, you lose X% of your customers who depend on the flexibility and features but you serve way better to the remaining (100-X)% and end up with an increased market share as long as the increase in quality is meaningful and X < 20 or something.
For what it's worth, this is a feature I've long wanted but hadn't realised it until now (I've always hated the way how browsers normally organise the history).
Take the most innovative thing you can't think of and then apply the same arguments to it. It's easy to see what problems things solve after they come into existence, less so in advance. That's why innovation involves the risk of failure.
Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
Anyway, I'm using Vivaldi on Linux because the clean looks. No ugly borders or any of the other ugly Linux things. That and tab stacking.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&so...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi-brow...
https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring-problem-...
etc...
It's part of the 1.8 release of the browser launched today.
Yes there is the web history Google provides but it is very basic level of access.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14250/feature-requests-for-1...
My main beef with Chrome isn't privacy - it's battery usage. I keep looking for a browser that doesn't kill my battery (MBP) but allows for multiple profiles.
You can install the Containers experiment extension here:
the address bar brings up the Win10 OSK just fine. But any input areas in pages require that i bring up the keyboard manually.
And the whole browser seems to go unresponsive to touch input at irregular intervals.
Sad really, as they give me the ability to scale the UI as i see fit. Thus making the various elements that much easier to hit with a finger.
I've tried Vivaldi and really like it, but I'm pretty dedicated to Firefox. I'd probably play with Vivaldi more if they had a Mozilla sync adapter.
Otherwise you can do everything Vimium can by customising keyboards shortcuts and using the "Quick Commands" menu (similar function as the menu brought up when typing "O" in Vimium).
Keyboard Shortcuts settings: vivaldi://settings/keyboard/
Quick Commands menu: https://help.vivaldi.com/article/quick-commands-menu/
are there any good "hackable" web browsers these days?
Now we need sync and attachable dev tools window.
vivaldi://settings/startup/
Or something different, e.g. customising the "Speed Dial" pages further?
Thanks!
But in a few weeks, in Firefox stuff like this will be impossible – as the browser devs refuse to implement these features, and refuse to give extension devs the ability to override such browser-native features while still feeling native.
I built a similar extension for Firefox which I didn’t publish (the reasons will be obvious at the end of this paragraph), where I log the entire browser history on my own server, transform all loaded pages via reader mode, also log them, then provide fulltext search in all of them, which sites were visited after another, how did I open tabs, etc, forever.
This means I can search history for years, with postgres fulltext search, and find anything I’ve visited or read about, pages I saw before or after, etc.
It’s an amazing tool, but obviously once Firefox enforces WebExtensions, it’s useless, because I can’t integrate it with the omnibar or with the history tool anymore.
In this case, what is wrong with the history [1] and omnibox [2] APIs?
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...
That’s the problem. I don’t want to glue a new frontend on top of what exists, I want to completely replace every history API the browser provides, and replace it with my own.
I, as extension dev, can’t remove the history API’s implementation, and build my own implementation. I can’t change what backend the browser’s history UI uses, or replace that UI.
I can’t hijack the history button in the menu, or replace it.
With Firefox, today, with lots of hackery, I can get pretty close. But I still can’t fully get there.
With the new WebExtensions, I can only add UI – but not replace UI, or add backend functionality, or replace backend functionality.
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/override
This would be sufficient to create the type of feature described in the article.
Not sure why you'd want to replace the backend, this could break other extensions. Both WebExtensions and Chrome extensions allow changing/deleting browser history items, which should enable most things extensions would want to do.
As I said above, the whole point is to do my own history tracking system, which stores history via a sync system of my own, in a server of my own.
And loads it from there, too.
The user has a webinterface, mobile interface, app integration with browsers, etc.
You can easily do fulltext search of all sites you’ve ever visited, etc.
"Breaking" other extensions is intentional – I want to replace the backend in which they search.
I want to provide far more than what any of these browsers provide, although Vivaldi is still the closest yet.
If Firefox provides a sane API for this in the future, I might do a public (and FLOSS) rewrite.
We are actually actively building the full-text history and bookmarks search as a chrome (and soon also FF extension) (http://worldbrain.io) It's also all open-source.
We have some ideas regarding the server infra as well: https://github.com/WorldBrain/Research-Engine/issues/43
Maybe good to connect and share some thoughts. (We are also in Germany. Berlin to be exact.)