Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

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This seems very cool and all, but surely 99.99% of regular users have never really thought about seeing their browsing history in a calendar view, or wanted or cared for statistics about it. I am fairly sure a significant proportion of users aren't even totally sure how to access their history - apart from during brief moments of paranoia when they want to keep nefarious things from a partner - and, if they really were looking for something they know they'd seen before, surely they'd just think, "I found this before, I'll just google for it again." (Similarly bookmarks, frankly.)

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?

> 99.99% of regular users

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.

Is making a browser for power users a bad thing? Does all software have to be lowest common denominator?

Also worth noting: users often don't know what they want until they see it. Tabs in browsers were a 'power feature' NetCaptor introduced (and Opera copied), then they got really popular.

Err, Opera was doing "tabs" for the word go. Only that Opera used MDI. This was present all the way to the end of Opera 12.

Absolutely not - and I didn't mean my post to come across as negative. If this is purely a feature intended for power users - or if the whole piece of software is intended for them - then that's totally fine. Aside from the slightly meaningless strapline, a lot of the copy on the Vivaldi homepage is definitely promoting the sort of customisation only power users care about - so perhaps you're bang on the money there.

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.

> Does all software have to be lowest common denominator?

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.

In a hard market to crack it makes sense to try and do something different. If it fails then they're no worse off then before. If it works then it's a massive boom for them.

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).

This might be true but in that case I'm in the 0.01% who want to know how much time I spend on HN and other sites instead of working. I ended up installing a time tracker(ManicTime) but I just realized that history statistics in the browser would be good enough for me.

Yes, you're being unfair. 'Solving problems people genuinely face' is never going to result in innovation, because it's maintenance for the existing paradigm. You are not going to find brilliant new ideas by pulling support tickets.

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.

Thank you. I've always enjoyed this quote from Francis M. Cornford, which perhaps takes an opposing view:

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.

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