If you’re not using Vivaldi on the desktop, this isn’t for you (yet). It doesn’t have many of the features that desktop Vivaldi has, and it doesn’t have many features that other browsers don’t. Right now the main feature of this is that it syncs with the desktop version, which is something that people (Vivaldi users) have been asking for for a long time.
But Vivaldi (the company), over the course of many years, took their desktop browser from a Chromium clone to the most feature-packed browser currently available. I’m confidently they’ll do the same with their mobile browsers.
Yeah, it doesn't have any of the integrated apps or any of the tab features (stacking/tiling). It does have an ad/tracker blocker built in (vs. Safari). But I use Firefox on iOS because it supports sync and Firefox is my primary desktop browser. I like Vivaldi, but not as privacy-focused as Firefox, they don't have Containers, for example, and I use that heavily.
Safari on iOS does have ads blocking, e.g., AdGuard, Wipr, 1Blocker. It doesn't work so well versus uBlock Origin, ofc.
Alternative browsers don't have that much control over what's rendered, so they are probably using the same content blocking functionality baked into Safari.
Good to know, will try it, although I don't understand how Firefox's uBlock Origin can work without having its own rendering engine. Are you sure it works?
It does work, at least mostly. My understanding is that the Orion team implemented the Firefox/Chromium extension APIs as part of their app's wrapper around iOS's web view. Apparently this was difficult but possible with the control iOS grants apps over its embeddable privileged web view.
Yeah ok, looks like Vivaldi has just replicated what Arc did. I downloaded the Arc browser, took a look, realized it offered me nothing (I don't care to sync what I'm doing on desktop to my phone), uninstalled.
Opera has a dedicated gaming browsing, Opera GX, yes.
Vivaldi's schtick is that they have every setting and feature that you want and quite a few that you don't. Tab stacks, pinned tabs, split screen, mouse gestures, notes, a full mail client, an RSS reader, ad blocker, custom themes, all built into the browser. And just a ton of customizability. You can control the position and show/hide every UI element (vertical tabs is amazing if you've never tried it), you can create "command chains" (a set of commands which fire in sequence on a keyboard shortcut), and if that's not enough, you can install CSS and JS mods for arbitrary functionality.
But this is just on desktop, just about none of those features exist on mobile right now.
My big issue with Vivaldi is the very noticeable lag in the UI compared to chrome/edge. every time I've tried over the last 3-5 years I've been disappointed and switched back to chrome, I wish I could switch to FF, but I have a few extensions I can't do without
Recently switched to Vivaldi and the new tab lag is annoying as I cannot Ctrl+t Ctrl+v too quickly, have to wait x00ms. Tried turning off many features on the new tab page but doesn't fix it.
Unfortunately every feature that you want doesn't include trackpad gesture navigation. I just want to be able to navigate back and forward using 2 finger swipes like every other browser allows me to do. It seems like a small thing but it is the muscle memory I have. Not having it eliminates Vivaldi from my consideration. Also not a fan of how quickly it kills my laptop's battery but I might be able to over look that.
This might be an OS difference, but on Mac or Linux I can use a two finger swipe to go back. (I can also press with two fingers and move in order to trigger a mouse gesture, which other browsers do not have.)
According to Vivaldi this feature was added to the development pipeline in May of this year. It doesn't show as implemented. It hasn't worked on Windows or Linux for me as recently as last week.
Lack of an option to have the address bar at the bottom near the keyboard like on Safari, lack of address bar gestures for tab navigation. I don't see the iOS version of Vivaldi having any features that would be compelling enough to degrade my user experience by switching to it.
The only other bottom address bar browser with gestures that I have seen is Kiwi on Android and I am surprised this paradigm is still not more common.
Orion on iOS has addr bar on the bottom, also supports rich set of gestures for tab navigation, if you're looking for an alternative to safari on iOS I'd take a look at that. They also offer a mac option, no MS option yet.
I might have missed an update in the past couple of days, but, otherwise, the experience on a fully up-to-date iPad Mini is the same like in Android in the past. Maybe a bit worse, too.
It happily crashes, lags, as in, the touches take a couple of seconds to register, and overheats the iPadlet like I've been using the pen for 30+ minutes in the summer.
Also, I can not understand why they do not have the custom themes on mobile, Android or i*OS.
> In most browsers on mobile, it’s difficult to keep track of many open tabs.
> We’ve integrated an elegant desktop-style Tab Bar in the UI by default.
I think there's a good reason why no mobile browsers implement desktop style tabs. Even the Vivaldi screenshots in this post show just 2.5 tabs with significant truncation of all the visible tabs. On tablet this might work (where other browsers have a more traditional tab view), but on portrait phone this seems like a terrible idea.
Their screenshot just illustrates their poor design defaults. If you could remove useless padding, make the icon smaller, and remove the close button (and the + button) like you can do on a desktop, you could fit more useful info there
You could also do the same with the url bar, and then you're looking at just a bit more vertical space vs safari with more information and functionality
I'm not seeing a whole lot about whether or not this uses WebKit or Blink -- and IIRC newer versions of iOS have relaxed the policy about needing to use WebKit.
There is ongoing pressure to open that up and there have been changes to allow non-Safari default browsers, but at the moment WebKit is still the name of the game for iOS.
Vivaldi's target users are power-users who want every feature imaginable. They're not adding new features to browser for "growth", they're adding new features to the browser because their founding philosophy is that software should be as flexible and powerful as possible.
Then where is text reflow on zoom? Something easily done on desktop, and done by opera via chromium ebgine, and (crapily) by kiwi.
It's literally a game changer, sonething many want, yet the sheer lack of care and concern for those with vision disabilities, or just older users, is astounding.
Every desktop browser does zoom reflow, and it was removed from chrome just because google wanted to punish website who didn't make proper mobile websites. What a bunch of asshats.
"It's not chrome" is a pretty compelling feature for many. If you ignore Brave's insistence on following shitty web3 trends, it's an open source chromium fork that matches Chrome in performance and reliability while supporting the blocking of ads and trackers, and importantly ripping out all the ways Google sucks up all your usage data in Chrome.
I find the promise of ‘unmatched personalisation’ or customisation lacklustre here. If you’re seeking something more customisable I’d suggest Quiche Browser. It’s a recent app by an independent developer that provides an experience that offers more UI customisation in a tasteful manner. Sure there are fewer bells and whistles features, but if you just want a minimal, privacy conscious browser that can adapt to you it may be worth a shot.
According to Screen Time I am using my phone on average about 1.5 hours a day. I can't imagine a scenario where I would need a "speed dial" function to bring up many different sites at once, in order to do "real work". I use a computer for that.
It's interesting to note that other people have entirely different usage patterns of their phones and actually prefer a small screen to a proper computer.
Not saying either is right/wrong, just curious. How prevalent is this on HN, I wonder?
My thumb can’t stretch like that.. perhaps try out an app on real devices instead of simulators.
Edit:
It is quite fast. Search button tries to fix address bar location, but I don’t like it. Switching tabs is a pain and sweeping them interferes with iOS app switching. Difficult to add a new tab
yeah, "supposed to" is doing a quite a bit of heavy lifting. it has gotten soooo much better than in the past, but yet things still do slightly weird things depending on browser. the closer to the designer you are, the more you notice. by notice, i mean have it pointed out to you.
It's not just about the engine itself, it's about things like supporting extensions. Safari's content blocker API is less powerful than Firefox's on desktop/Android, for example. I don't know how much of that is a technical engine limitation versus an Apple policy decision.
Although I appreciate Vivaldi for getting a iOS version out, do keep in mind that it's very inferior to Safari much like all non-Safari browsers on iOS running WebKit because of how very privileged Safari is and sadly their hands are very tied. The only hope is that the EU's DMA and DSA can allow third-party browsing engines on iOS eventually, and this release is a head start type of move toward that goal I feel.
Until that happens, Safari will always be the only browser that truly matters if you use a iOS device and that's a fact.
> Although I appreciate Vivaldi for getting a iOS version out, do keep in mind that it's very inferior to Safari much like all non-Safari browsers on iOS running WebKit because of how very privileged Safari is and sadly their hands are very tied. The only hope is that the EU's DMA and DSA can allow third-party browsing engines on iOS eventually, and this release is a head start type of move toward that goal I feel.
This is a double sided coin. 90% of the browsers on Google Play are absolute trash (if not, arguably, straight up malware), and some are apparently very popular.
Give 3rd party iOS browsers more permissions, and devs will exploit every single bit of privilege to the max, and then some, en masse.
Isn't this more of a problem of Google being too permissive about trash browsers on their store than an issue of whether a browser can have its own JIT compiler?
Firefox on Android is great IMO, fast, not power hungry and the extensions/features are awesome. I love not being bothered by ads, even on YouTube, and having videos play in the background.
Firefox for Android guzzles power like crazy, even slightly more than Chrome
You probably come out ahead if you load it up with a real adblocker though
Being able to browse with uBlock and Privacy Badger is a game changer for me. I basically don't use my mobile browser at all on iOS, and I don't use any social media or news apps either, so you can guess how useful the device is.. haha
When Android is the only real alternative "just don't buy iPhones" isn't a very compelling argument. Android has tons of problems and likewise, the only alternative users really have is the iPhone. Consumers need more than two options if the free market is going to be effective.
There will not be more than two options anytime soon, and what a lot of people miss here, it’s developer’s fault too.
Microsoft in their last few years tried very hard to incentivise developers to build apps for Windows Phone.
But many didn’t bother. Some even only targeted iOS because of the reach and how amazing the development experience was, including less devices to test and support compared to Android and Windows Phone.
And this made the choice for consumers easier, when (I don’t remember the names) some very popular and big apps at the time were not natively available on Windows Phone at all.
Even Tim Sweeney never brought Unreal Engine to Windows Phone despite their promises and I’d say played part to build the current status quo.
Developers voted with their time to build apps for a 30% fee marketplace that suddenly was a gateway to distribute their work to millions of users worldwide that was not heard of before in the era of Windows Mobile. (pre iPhone)
And now they cry wolf about the system they’ve voluntarily helped to build.
It doesn't really matter how it came to be or who was involved. The point is there are two options now and there is no sign of that changing any time soon. And this affects almost everyone, not just developers. Smartphones are ubiquitous in North America and Europe, and just about everyone uses them to access the web via a browser.
What makes you say this? There are plenty of examples to the contrary. Airlines, cars, gas stations, shoes, beer, bikes, browsers, power tools, pizzas, etc.
Sure, there are plenty of duopolies out there, but there are also plenty of monopolies. That doesn't mean they're inevitable.
This may be the illusion of choice provided by disruption... Eventually all would settle to just two if no further disruption (periods of chaos) challenged the natural order of dominance. Not feasible in reality as change is constant. Just in theory. Occasionally we see a clear bifurcation the more order we nuance out in large complex systems like politics where the stakes are high and attention is great. We settle on left or right. The sage walks two roads in this case.
You can already download alternative browsers, their engine isn't what is stopping them from running spam, it's the app review process. And in any case, I have older relatives on both platforms and I don't see more problems with dogy apps on the pixel than on the iphone, both of them are full of spam notifications but otherwise totally functional.
Most users won't change the defaults anyways, I think this fear is well overblown.
No, I meant 100% since the limitations you support affect literally everyone your misleading stats notwithstanding
> That’s why iPhone today is still the #1 mobile phone with highest loyalty and consumer satisfaction scores for over a decade.
That's just another thing you've made up
> You don’t become an industry changing leader and stay #1 by “crippling 100% of users”. It’s just what you think is crippling, others don’t care about.
That's a rather simplistic view of the real world where leadership and customer satisfaction must depend on the single factor you're currently arguing about. In reality you could easily be a leader across a bunch of areas and then totally fail in others with the overall balance still being in your favor
Yes, it affects 100% of iPhone users, because... they're an iPhone user.
But 99.9% don't care about running non WebKit browser, so it doesn't cripple 100% of users because they are not affected by this.
Same as having no Flash support today doesn't cripple 100% of iPhone users, because they don't care about it.
Go and ask your friends/parents/family/grandparents if they're crippled by not being able to run a non WebKit browser and listen to their answers.
I'm not making up numbers, I'm generalising it.
There's 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world, and there's ~26 million developers in world, that's less than 2% of 1.5 billion. Only a set of ~26 million developers have iPhones, even smaller set know the word WebKit, and even smaller set of those that know what WebKit means even care that their iPhone cannot run a non WebKit browser.
So yes, I can generalise and say that 0.01% of iPhone users care about non WebKit browsers. I can make it 0.1%, 1% or even 2%, it doesn't change the point - a minority of techies who like to tinker with their gadgets (including some business owners who want to increase their revenue) want to force their needs on 99% of people by exposing over a billion people to new security and privacy threats and attack vectors.
All while for the last 15 years they were happily piggy backing in the walled garden that was designed this way since day 1 and playing key role in Apple's success building a marketplace of 1.5 billion people that was unimaginable in 2008. And then suddenly 15/30% became too much, please change the terms we were playing along for 15 years, open up the iPhone!!
I think it’s time to recognize that the web browser engine needs to be a trusted, hardened system-level component to protect user security: these engines deals directly with executing untrusted code being served from potential attackers.
Can that be done without disabling JIT for the rest of us? My app would benefit greatly from JIT compilation, and it's always been a bummer that it can't realize its full performance potential on iOS.
That's not a fact. All browsers on iOS use the same rendering engine. The differences between them are all in the UI and other front-end features. That doesn't make Safari superior to them, especially since they're all starting off with the same base rendering. Anything outside of that can easily be better than Safari.
> Memory pages marked as both writable and executable can be used only by apps under tightly controlled conditions: The kernel checks for the presence of the Apple-only dynamic code-signing entitlement. Even then, only a single mmap call can be made to request an executable and writable page, which is given a randomized address. Safari uses this functionality for its JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.
In other words, Apple only allows Apple to do Javascript JIT on iOS.
While this is technically true, WKWebView (which I believe is used by all non-Apple browsers on iOS) does allow Javascript JIT, because the renderer runs in a subprocess with these permissions. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19379739 .
But there are many other reasons besides JIT to want to have non-Apple-Webkit-based rendering engines (including wanting different JS engines with their own JIT) - and so IMO it's very much a restriction that regulators should force Apple to relax. The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Interesting, thanks. Didn't realise there was ways to embed WebKit views that also got JIT (escaped the walled garden a while ago!)
Still, my original point still stands. As you note, you can't have Spidermonkey running on iOS doing JIT. But you also couldn't have Gecko doing rendering and using WebKit JIT, either. ... Right?
> The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Completely agree. The "it's for your own security" angle is just usual Apple FUD to make their anti-competitive stance seem pro-consumer.
Orion is the first browser on iOS that has convinced me to move away from safari. From the Kagi team, and admittedly still in beta, it's fast, rejects telemetry, and allows install of Chrome and Firefox extensions. The built-in pop up and blocking is great, and nukes YT ads too.
Still a little rough around the edges (sometimes freezes; restart it; and switching orientation is slow), but the pros outweigh the cons.
It does allow installation of webextensions. Unfortunately, they are extremely buggy on iOS. I was pretty disappointed when uBlock Origin installed successfully but didn't do anything. Once the webextension support is stabilized, Orion can be a serious alternative to Safari.
But Vivaldi (the company), over the course of many years, took their desktop browser from a Chromium clone to the most feature-packed browser currently available. I’m confidently they’ll do the same with their mobile browsers.