Otter Browser – Aims to recreate the best aspects of classic Opera UI using Qt5 | Hacker News Reader

Otter Browser – Aims to recreate the best aspects of classic Opera UI using Qt5

otter-browser.org

109 pointsbjoko47 comments

There's also Falkon, now a KDE project, which I prefer. The UI is more like Firefox, and it's QtWebEngine-only, which is maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days.

https://www.falkon.org/

> maintained, unlike QtWebKit these days

Seems somewhat revived/maintained by annulen [0] as pointed out in these release notes. Also, QtWebEngine seems to usually be behind a Chromium version or two which, among other reasons, is why I use CEF in my Qt-based browser (granted I'm behind a couple versions on public releases, but that's my fault).

0 - https://github.com/annulen/webkit/tree/master

Yes, that QtWebKit revival is interesting and worth watching. I haven't followed, but I'm still not sure if it's up-to-date. This blog post from a WebKitGTK+ (with a section about QtWebKit) developer from 2017 is the best info I could find: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/08/06/endgame-for-we...

And yes, QtWebEngine does not keep up with Chromium, but it is updated to some degree. I wish Qt and distros could at least keep better up-to-date with security fixes, but it's easier said than done!

Screenshots: https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/

I find open source websites which can't provide a simple slideshow for viewing screenshots very depressing.

Do these developers seriously expect interested viewers to click back and forth just to see their graphics?

This is the first time I've ever heard 'clicking a mouse button' declared an egregious violation of the user's effort. Is this a widespread concern? How do you use the web?

most of the people nowadays surf from mobile

The problem I really have with all these alternative browsers is one of trust. It always comes down to just blindly trusting the signed binaries posted online by "some internet guy" on a random website. Even Chromium suffers from this. For an application which I will be entering credit card details, social security numbers, and all other imaginable form of private data, this is non-negotiable.

I believe it's not exactly correct to separate browsers and non-browsers this way.

On desktop systems, a malicious program typically can access most data from the other applications. Personally, saw a few non-browser programs that had an "extra functionality" that swept the drives and phoned back home - and never saw a browser with malicious extras (except for third-party browser extensions). Not saying this couldn't happen, just that I feel that direct approach is somewhat less likely.

One browser that does phone home is UC Browser[0]. I agree with you though, you don't truly know what will happen when you install any application on your desktop without proper inspection. With so many security researchers out there I'm surprised they don't inspect software for that kind of thing and do public reviews, and showcase evidence of phoning home without consent / notifying the end-user in an obvious fashion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser

Having used Opera for many years this sounded intriguing. After playing around with it for a bit, less so. Ok it got the mouse gestures, thanks, but for the rest: lots of small quirks which make it feel way too alpha (UI looks messy, different colors for menu bars and address bar/tabs, search box is pretty small, seems to use multiple icon themes or so, buttons with text clipped, ALT-D goes to address bar but doesn't select all text, the new tab page doesn't show icons nor tile images nor address so you have to hover to find out what a tie does, ...), doesn't feel particularly fast, and it doesn't have mail which was like the single thing making me stick with Opera for too long :P

Apart from that it's pretty cool nonetheless, and good that people still remember the proper Opera of back in the days.

Perhaps report your findings to the developers, to potentially have them fixed?

The Vivaldi (Vivaldi.com) browser is what Opera would have been if the 12 linage had continued into this day.

I doubt that Opera would've become a poorly performing browser with UI built with node.js.

I use it everyday and find its features and compability !

Looks nice, their front-page really could use some pagination love, I shouldn't get more than 10 weeks worth of updates on 1 page. I have to scroll all the way to the bottom before I can see the FAQ which is something I'd want immediately available without having to scroll down too far, or on it's own page, otherwise people will just think they don't even have an FAQ.

The only reason I prefer Chrome over competitors is the speed of startup (including cold) even with lots of open tabs. I close and start the browser many times and so far nothing beats Chrome.

firefox solves that by not loading all tabs except the active one. tabs are then loaded when they are opened.

I know but ff startup is still slow, including warm.

Try Brave developer edition. It’s now built on chromium. So far it’s been very stable for me and amazingly fast (plus privacy benefits). I no longer use Chrome or Firefox at all.

It is admirable that they took on this job, but I would probably stay away from it for serious things because of security aspect. Modern browsers (Chrome - Firefox) are probably a much safer choice.

I don't think that is a reason to not attempt developing new things.

And anyways, this is using the QTWebKit, my understanding is most of the security related aspects are from there. Since it is a fork of WebKit I imagine it gets security updates from there.

But a good reason not to use it.

QtWebKit has a horrible security track record: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/02/01/on-webkit-secu...

On the other hand, browsers with a large user base are a more likely/profitable target for hacking.

This is Chromium-based, so is part of the largest user base, and because it's downstream it will always be at least a bit out of date.

I think there are lots of useful things alternative browsers could do, and I'd like to see some succeed, but this problem seems difficult to get around.

> A system or component relying on obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that if the flaws are not known, that will be sufficient to prevent a successful attack. Security experts have rejected this view as far back as 1851, and advise that obscurity should never be the only security mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Security through obscurity is bad, but the original comment wasn't about security through obscurity in that sense.

I couldn't find any mention of rendering engine or capabilities and plugin system.

QTWebKit (and experimental QtWebEngine based on Chromium)

opera 12.x FOSS version spinoff

Opera 12 rendering engine was entirely closed source, so a FOSS spinoff isn't possible. This is mainly working on recreating the UI experience only, with a very different rendering engine.

Interesting - I’ll try it out, quite curious to see how it compares with Vivaldi, which has an Opera-like UI with the Chromium engine.

Otter predates Vivaldi (at least publicly)—I think Otter started very very soon after Opera 12 was discontinued. It's also open source (which imo was Opera's downfall), and uses an engine that is not the dominant one on the market (albeit a close cousin); I think both of these points are on its favour.

On the other hand, Vivaldi seems to have more resources behind it, as well as the name of Jon von Tetzchner, which helps adoption. It just seems to be making the same mistakes Opera did (closed source, so the community can never bring it forward independently), with the added downside of being really no different from the market leader under the hood (rendering).

Vivaldi's source code is available https://vivaldi.com/source/

Opera 12s source is also available, yet it would still be illegal for someone to fork it as it'sa closed licence. Available source is not open source—the difference is having a legal right to continue development.

Of course, legality doesn't stop some people ;-)

There have been very interesting creations, like 10 versions of Windows on one live DVD, made by those who couldn't care less about the legal aspects. Such a "underground" browser would be an interesting thing indeed... there was a discussion here on HN about the source code leak not long ago.

I'd very very much like to see such an underground effort. We can dream...

interesting, like the poster above i am fairly certain to remember that vivaldi was closed source at one point.

i could not find any mention of the license anywhere on the site, so i dug it out of the source archive to find a 3-clause BSD license. very nice!

Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.

it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that.

it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories

EDIT: the README contains this:

Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms.

those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.

According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it):

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/

> Is Vivaldi Open Source?

> Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package.

> In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit.

> Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits

This reddit comment explains in a bit more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_v...

From the Reddit comment:

> Vivaldi runs as a React app on top of Chromium, but to make that possible, they had to make changes to the way Chromium works (likely how it handles extensions).

That’s really interesting — their UI is pretty fast and responsive, so even if it’s not FOSS it’s an interesting approach to dig into. Would anyone knowledgeable be able to compare this with the Electron-based approach most other Chromium customisers use?

thanks, you found the statement that i was unsuccessfully searching for.

what is disappointing is, that there is no explanation as to why.

one redditor claims to understand why vivaldi is doing that, but frankly, i don't.

if the UI source is public anyways, why not put it under a FOSS license? what do they have to gain from not making it open? and while they say i may read the source to audit it, why should i bother if i can't use the source and work with it? i am not going to audit closed source unless i am paid for doing so.

My problem with alternative browsers is that I'm locked-in because of a few plugins, and I cannot be bother reinstalling all settings and plugins (including plugin settings) when I change computer.

Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me.

Otherwise, it's hard.

> Any browser that will let me sync settings and plugins, and that has the plugins I need (Slither, Pocket, AdGuard), I'll try and continue using if it works for me.

Firefox does this, no?

Yup. I did use if for a while.

Brave can use Chrome plugins. No tracking, optional Tor.

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