IamA Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi. I also founded Opera Software. Browsers are in my blood. AMA!

How is the browser different to other browsers on the market?

Most mainstream browsers try to be simple, which sounds great until you want to do something more advanced.

Vivaldi is different. We have a wealth of features and we adapt to the users' needs.

You choose how you interact with the browser. You choose how the browser looks and where things are placed. We adapt.

How do you intend to keep a feature-rich browser performing well? It seems to me like all other browsers slow down significantly once they start piling on additional features.

Also, from a UI standpoint: how do you expect to make the features easily accessible to the users within the current trend of ever-slimmer browser UIs?

Most browsers today are all about providing as little functionality as possible. The only way to get functionality is to download extensions, but many extensions, not cooperating can make the browser slow. This is what most browser users have experienced.

By integrating a lot of features into the browser instead, we make make sure those basic and advanced features run smoothly.

When are you going to release it as free software (free as in Stallman)?

We have the C++ code as open source now. As far as making the rest of Vivaldi open source, we're still discussing the implications and want to make the best possible decision.

How much easier is it to code and develop a browser compared to lets say 20 years ago?

It is gradually getting harder. At least if you want to do it from scratch, including building your own rendering engine. There is a reason why nobody has done that for more than 15 years. We had more than 100 people working on Presto at Opera and we needed to add more.

The browser today does a lot more than it did when we started in 1994 at Opera. We made the Opera 1.0 with 3 people. We made Vivaldi 1.0, using Chromium, with around 20 developers.

So things are getting harder. But the requirements are also a lot bigger now than then.

Opera 1.0 was a simple browser. Vivaldi is not.

Any plans to have a cloud-sync feature? (passwords, bookmarks, etc)

Yes. It is in the works.

Will it be possible for users to host their own sync server, like Firefox?

No decision has been made on that at this time. Generally we tend to provide what our users ask for, if at all possible.

If we could host our own sync server, this would be perfect for corporations and home uses!

Hmm, Opera came with server-like features once, the idea was home upload speed was good enough for people to serve their own content, e.g. photo sharing without needing to rely on Dropbox, Facebook or any other cloud solution. I only played around with it briefly, seems it disappeared quite quickly too...

Opera Unite was a IMHO brilliant technology. Sadly it was discontinued when I quit Opera.

Any ballpark timeline?

I have to give the same answer I always give: when it's ready. :)

How about a Virtual reality browser?

This brings me memories...of VRML.

We will see what the future brings. Clearly we are provinding new ways to interact with the browser.

At Opera we even provided Face Gestures... :). But that is another story...

Do you have any thoughts on ad-blocking and how should web browsers relate to this?

That is quite complicated. Some users want ad blocking, while blocking all ads could make it difficult for the free web.

We leave it to extensions to provide ad blocking. There are plenty of good choices there for those that want it.

What about letting us create the list of things to block? (as in Opera 12)

You can go into the content blocking page action and edit it if you like.

What about intrusive ads that commandeer pages and cause popups, popunders and error messages that force you to click "ok" and become a download link for unwelcome files? Surely the malicious nature of these ads is a problem that browsers could address directly.

Popup blocking has been part of browsers for a long time. As said before, it is a dilemma, but I feel that there are good extensions available for those that want that.

In retrospect, do you consider going for the stock market a good idea? It seems that was when you started losing control of what Opera should be.

There was never a choice. We got funds from investors. Thus we had to provide an exit. Going to the stock market was a natural exit as the other exit was a company sale.

But this time we have a choice.

So Vivaldi has no external investors. There will be no exit.

Does this mean that it's just your money that's gone into this? Is Vivaldi generating any revenue? How will Vivaldi generate revenue in the future?

Yes, Vivaldi is funded by me and owned by the team that works at Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is starting to generate revenue. We generate revenue from search and select bookmarks. We try to select partners that our users appreciate.

I came to ask this, as a longtime fan of your software. Is search partners and select bookmarks enough? What if one day it isn't?

I promote Vivaldi as much as I can, btw. I was one of the people who stuck with Opera 12.04 until compatibility issues made it very impractical. Hell, I stuck with it a while longer, actually.

It is all a question of having enough users. We do not make a lot of money on each user, so we need a few million users to break even. After we get that we can grow some more as a company.

Thanks for using Opera and now Vivaldi and supporting us. It means a lot to me and all the team. We are making Vivaldi for you!

Hello, big fan of opera 12. I feel like opera ASA really insulted their loyal users by dumbing down pretty much everything in the rework.

I'm closely watching Vivaldi and otter browser, waiting for one of them to implement reasonable tab minimization, since I've given up hope on a full MDI.

Is Vivaldi planning on allowing tab minimization? That is really the most important part of my web browsing work flow.

Thank you for the AMA!

I would recommend that you try out a few things in Vivaldi.

1. Try out tab stacks.

2. Enable "Click active tab to switch to previous tab"

I would think this should get you where you want to go. It is very powerful.

But overall we aim to please, so lets see what the future brings.

Thanks for asking!

Thanks for the response, I'm not a fan of those because both require me to move my mouse to a specific location on the screen (which tends to be rather small). Down left in Opera 12 was great because I didn't have to break the flow of whatever I was doing to move my mouse all the way up and back to the active area of the window.

That said, if the functionality exists as a click action (ie, clicking on the active tab to switch to the previous active tab), maybe that being bindable to a mouse gesture would suffice for me, depending on how it works in practice. Is that possible with Vivaldi?

Thanks!

Sounds like a feature request and a good one as well. Let me see what we can do. In the future you will be able to make your own mouse gestures and tie them to any function.

What features do you plan to add? Are there any particular that are prioritized over other?

The biggest features we are working on are sync and mail, but there is a lot more coming. Wait and you will see. :)

We listen to our users and we are making tweaks and improvements all the time.

Could you/Vivaldi team set up a public and official feature request tracker? Something like UserVoice? I really miss it, as it's hard to track the forums both for you and us.

Also are the following things in the pipeline?

• ability to remove standard UI elements (like back, forward buttons - same way as in Opera 12)
• more customizable new tab experience (eg. always load a website)
• better downloads experience (as Opera 12: locations per file format, or ask always, downloads UI in a tab)

Thanks!

PS: I'm incredibly thankful for you and the whole Vivaldi team for your work - finally a browser for the power user exists again :)

Thank you for your kind words and support!

We have asked our users what they would like us to implement. We are gradually working on that list. At the same time we innovate.

I think it would be hard to make a simple list as we love picking up things our users want us to do.

So our process is not linear.

We will provide ways to add and remove items in the UI. That is high on our TODO list.

Overall we will continue to improve every single piece of Vivaldi. We look at the feedback we get and we continue to add options, innovations and generally improve the code.

Our goal is to continue doing that until you get Vivaldi to behave exactly the way you like it to behave and to look exactly the way you like it to look. After that we will continue to innovate and add options. :)

EDIT: Posted too soon.

I'm very impressed by the slight amount of Memory processed when using Vivaldi! How did you manage to achieve that, compared to Chrome & Firefox who are known to be Memory Hogging? - Sami

There are a lot of details. One part of that is lazy loading of tabs and tabs hibernation. But generally we are always looking at ways to reduce memory usage.

Thoughts on Opera being sold to Chinese companies one of which is the infamous 360 "antivirus" creator?

I am saddened to see Opera being sold like that, if that ends up being the case, and I am concerned about my many friends still at Opera.

Are you hiring?

EDIT: hiring is written without an 'e'. :)

We always have room for great people. :)

The browser today does a lot more than it did when we started in 1994 at Opera. We made the Opera 1.0 with 3 people. We made Vivaldi 1.0, using Chromium, with around 20 developers.

Do your developers tend to be in-house, or remote? I would like to hear your thoughts on why you do/don't use remote devs.

Most of the developers work in Oslo or in Reykjavik. We have a few remote as well. Generally we prefer to have people in the offices as it makes for a better work environment and easier communication.

Hi Jon!

One of the drawbacks of Vivaldi for now (and bear in mind, I write this on Vivaldi) is its dependence on the Chrome Store for extensions, so things that are Viv-specific like tab stacking can't really be customised as no devs have put out an extension - in particular, I'd like a "stack all tabs by site" button. Do you have any plans to promote extension-building on the Chrome Store?

Generally we try to make a lot of the things you need in Vivaldi. Thus you can make a request for functionality like this and we are likely to implement it for you (BTW, did you try stack tabs by host?).

There are also many extension providers supporting Vivaldi already and we might provide our own store in the future, but nothing is decided.

Do you plan to opensource Vivaldi in the near future?

All the C++ code is open source. We will discuss the rest of the code moving forward. No decision at this time.

Why are browsers so passive with web content? e.g. why do they allow pages to shift all over when ads are loading, or not display pages based on user preferences? If I go to a newspaper every day and visit the same three sections, couldn't a browser present me those three sections independent of stuff I always skip? Can they improve the UI for me, its owner, when a site won't?

edit: I would love a browser that allows me to control what and how pages are presented to me. Almost programmable, e.g. someone regularly checks their Linkedin inbox, uses just the imdb search, checks the NYTimes book reviews - why wouldn't they be able to see only that?

Have you checked out page actions in Vivaldi? We have provided a number to play with. Over time we will provide more. Out of the box we will show the pages as the author intented, but we do provide ways for you to adapt. Through zoom, through image loading control and through page actions. Over time we will provide ways for you to add your own page actions as well, or edit the ones there.

How about support for touchscreens on laptop devices? Websites don't see them as mobile devices, so touch functionality is often ignored.

We support touch, but we have a work to do to optimize for that. We will be doing that for sure.

I know nothing about opera composers, but I'm guessing Antonio Vivaldi is your favourite? What would you recommend to watch/listen for a complete novice?

You know, I like a lot of classical music. My great grandfather was a composer, Sigvaldi Kaldalóns, and I was brought up with his music.

I like a lot of Vivaldi's work, but also Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, etc.

What rendering engine does Vivaldi use and why did the team choose to use it ?

We are using Chromium/Blink. We felt that was the safest choice to make at this time as most others seem to be choosing that engine.

Do you feel sad leaving Presto behind? More to the point, the way the web evolved into the Wild West instead of a structured development?

I would have loved to use Presto. Sadly that is not an option and sadly Presto has not been maintained for 5 years. That is a long time for a great piece of software.

After all the work that went into Presto, what pushed you to switch to Blink?

Opera´s decision to move from Presto was not mine. I would never have done that. That happened after I left Opera and is one of the reasons that Vivaldi exists.

What's the coolest thing about the product?

Now where do I start... :)

The thing is that Vivaldi is different because we believe we should adapt to you instead of you adapting to us.

We believe we should provide you with all the features that you want and all the options that you want, so that you can get Vivaldi to behave just right for you.

So out of the box we have more features than any other browser. We also provide a colorful UI that IMHO looks very modern and fresh.

But every user will answer this question in different ways and IMHO that is what matters the most: individual design.

What do you think of new browsers like Brave Browser ?

I think it is great that we are seeing new choices in the browser market.

When do you plan to move Vivaldi's UI from Javascript to native?

There are no plans for that. There are a lot of benefits from having a Web-based UI.

Keep the rest as it is, but please add native window controls and menus.

Otherwise Vivaldi really sticks out like a sore ​thumb in Ubuntu.

Checked the settings?

Hi Jon! I'm very grateful for Opera and now Vivaldi. Thank you.

Do you think there is a market for a paid browser? Life-time license or even a subscription model? It is the software people use the most, after all.

Do you think letting Vivaldi prioritize the traffic of an active or video-streaming tab would be a useful feature?

Thank you!

I think the days of paid browsers are really gone. In any case I like the fact that we are able to make Vivaldi available for free. We make enough from search and select bookmarks to pay the bills and grow, when we get enough users. With your help and support, that should not take long.

I am not sure about the last one, to be true. If you are watching a video, that typically uses more bandwidth than anything else you might be doing. Clearly running multiple at the same time is not wise.

When will the built in mail client be ready?

WIR (when it's ready). It is very high priority.

Any plans to offer an Opera Turbo type platform? What about Opera Unite!

No current plans, but you never know what the future will bring.

IMHO Opera Unite was unique and I would love to do something in that direction in the future.

What do you think about Themes for Vivaldi, and is that something that will be supported? User made, and/or official?

As a browser company that prides itself in providing users a number of ways to customize... clearly we will be providing more ways to customize the browser, both themes provided by us and more ways for you to theme the browser.

Thanks for making a great browser in the spirit of the old Telenor days! I will give you or anyone on your team a celebratory lefse if they are in Virginia.

I understand the need to outsource and utilize chromium for your rendering engine. I am curious, has Vivaldi been able to contribute any fixes or new features back to the open source community? I always found it very enlightening to see everyone participating to improve a shared public resource.

What examples of improvements has Vivaldi made or plans to make to Chromium / Webkit/ etc?

Thank you for your kind words and thanks for the offer of a lefse. :)

So far we have mostly contributed by reporting bugs, sometimes with suggested fixes. Over time we hope to contribute more as our team grows.

All changes we have made to the C++ code for our own use is available for download.

Hello Jon

I have a small feature request, about extension icons in right upper corner Right now you can't move them if you have 2 or more icons there, they just stand there sorted in some way. Can we please have a feature to be able to move them like in Chrome?

Otherwise your browser is awesome, thanks for all the work.

Thanks for your kind words. We will provide this in the future, yes.

As the browser space is a fairly competitive field, how do you ultimately plan to monetize Vivaldi?

edit:spelling

We do it in the same way as all the other browsers. Through search and select bookmarks.

We aim to choose partners that are seen as being useful for our users.

Thank you for answering. Will you rule out selling user analytics and browsing history to 3rd parties, especially with respect to data collected by your future Sync tool?

We are making a browser for our friends. We do not collect user analytics and browsing history. Spying on your friends would be creepy.

Are the default bookmarks/speed dial entries sponsored?

One suggestion: I believe it would be nice to have localised content, through local partners -- for example, a Portuguese user would like to see Portuguese bookmarks. :-)

Some are sponsored. Most are not. We have tried to include useful bookmarks and we have gotten feedback from users as to which to include. Feel free to post suggestions on our community site, Vivaldi.net.

what do you think is the future of the mobile web browser ?

Most mobile browsers are very simple today. We believe there is room for a lot of improvements.

Phones are getting bigger screens and better HW, so it is a question of making use of these resources in a good way.

Other than Vivaldi, what Nordic startup are you most excited about?

There is a lot of cool startups in the Nordics. WeWantToKnow (DragonBox) is one. Dohop is another. Then there is OZ. These are all great companies (which I have invested in). But there are many more.

With Opera, you could open up your speed dial pages using CTRL + 1 to 9. Will this be possible with Vivaldi?

We have been discussing some options there. I am sure we can find a workable solution.

Jon and team, thanks a lot for your work on Opera (esp. 12.x). I basically grew up on the web with it.

What has your experience been with standards groups W3C, WHATWG, etc. in recent years? Since you basically depend on Chromium, I suspect your dependence on web tech internals is low.

Also, I've been following you on Facebook and noticed you and your team often work out of different locations. Can you tell us a little bit about your office spaces and work culture?

Thanks for your kind words. I am very proud of the work we did at Opera and the work we are now doing at Vivaldi. It is so gratifying building software for people like you that recognize our efforts.

At Opera we had the biggest team in W3C. We were one of the founders of WHATWG as well. This was something we were proud of.

Clearly we are using Chromium, but as we grow as a team, we hope to contribute more and more to the Web standards as well.

We have offices in Iceland, Norway and Gloucester, Massachusetts. We have also people working in the Bay area, St Petersburg, Prague and Finland.

All our offices are really nice. :)

We focus on making sure the work environments are good. We also meet together as a team on a regular basis in the US and in Iceland. We will have meetups in Oslo as well in the future.

We take the team really seriously. We have great people taking care of the team. One of the first members of the team is Anne Stavnes and she has brought together a great team focusing on making a great working environment.

Anne worked with me at Opera and was head of HR there. She did wonders there and she and her team are making wonders at Vivaldi as well.

What is your favorite Nordic / Scandinavian style breakfast?

Most Nordic people have bread with meats, cheese and salads. That works for me as well. :)

Hi, thanks for Opera! I used Opera through Opera 12 until a few months ago (never used post 12 beyond trying it out). My favorite Opera features were mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, content blocker, speed dial, custom search keywords, "." find in page, and many other useful odds and ends. I'm looking forward to trying Vivaldi :)

My question - having not done much JavaScript development but having had the opportunity recently, what roles should the browser play in script authoring? Should a browser play the role of IDE, debugger front-end, debugger back-end, DOM visualizer? Does it integrate with external third-party IDEs or tools for debug-time? Is there a philosophical difference between debugging DOM / code and debugging a particular browser runtime environment's visualization of the DOM or execution of the code?

Finally, what are you most excited about that's being done to make client-side scripting in general and JavaScript in particular suck less?

Thanks! Glad you are trying Vivaldi.

My colleague /u/pettern can answer your question better than I can.

Every browser seems to offer some sort of incognito window, but why do none of them offer incognito tabs?

We used to offer that at Opera. We aim to offer it at Vivaldi as well.

Can Vivaldi use the Google Search powered spell checker? The option exists but does not seem to work.

We will have to look into that. There were some issues with using that service, so we might choose another one.

Hi Jon, huge fan of Vivaldi. My question:

I really like the community aspect of Vivaldi, but it's sometimes hard to get help and rely on the community to troubleshoot problems, even with admins and mods. Now that you've launched officially, do you have plans to create more authoritative help content to help with onboarding and troubleshooting? Or are you planning to stay community focused and more "community run"?

Thanks for your kind words and support!

We plan to support you as well as we can. We added new help pages with Vivaldi and we will continue to evolve that with tutorials and the like.

But we will also continue to work with the community. It is an integral part of what Vivaldi is all about.

I know about web panels. Any plans to add support for Chrome style independent windows for websites that behave like native apps? For example, I use TweetDeck/Netflix as a web application in independent window instead of running it in a tab on Chrome. Would love Vivaldi to offer such a feature.

We may well do that later. We did this years ago at Opera with Widgets and Unite apps. I am sure we will do the same with Vivaldi at some time.

Do you know if there is a specific reason for why Opera removed the option of stacking tabs, or was it just to make the switch to WebKit easier? I'm very glad Vivaldi has implemented this, and will probably change my default browser soon (especially if the chinese acquisition proves succesful)

After I left Opera, there was a decision to make the browser a lot simpler. They cut out a lot of functionality even bookmarks, although they did get added later. This was more about philosophy than anything else.

We welcome you to Vivaldi.

While i love the features, i am fighting a bit with the fact that you use an app and extensions to create the Vivaldi experience.

I know that it is impossible to make all native, as Chromium constantly changes and Google would wipe out all the time the changes you make.

Why the reason for not using Electron and picking only the Chrome elements you want to have? Pretty sure that would have been the less problematic variant. As Google can not screw you up in such a big way as if you are using the whole Chromium package. Lib-chromium-content is pure blessing.

And i agree with many others in that, that Vivaldi should be fully FOSS. Pretty please?

We discussed a lot of different ways to do what we are doing at Vivaldi. It took us more than 6 months to decide how we would do this and we tried out a lot of alternative ways. We believe we found a great solution, although I am sure we will rewrite a lot of code moving forward. It is a natural thing to do when you are striving for excellence.

All the C++ code is fully open source at this time. The rest of the code is there and fairly accessible, although we do not provide a license at this time. But that may change. We continue to discuss our options.

Chrome user here. I know many users of Chrome are interested in the App you have created.

But why bundling it with an own modified Chromium version and not offering it over the Chromium app store? We already have Chrome and Google creates the most error free variant.

Watched few threads of your boards, seems you have tons of bugs, so why making things that complicated? Is there a technical reason for not offering it over the Google app store?

And why not fully Open Source?

Thanks and greetings!

We are building a browser and not an app. We continue to develop all sides of the browser, whether it is placed in the C++ core or the web side.

We would limit our selves a lot if we tried to do things on only the web side.

First off, I would like to thank you for creating opera, everyone in my country uses it and I think it is the same for almost every third world country. My first question is why do u think u dominate these markets especially in mobile? 2. What can we do to save on our data plan when we use opera since internet is ridiculously expensive here? And does Vivaldi help in this aspect? also what kind of improvements can we expect from opera. Sorry for the barrage of questions, just a big fan of your work.

Thank you for your support and your kind words. Let me take your questions one at a time. :)

When we started making Opera available on mobile, we were unique. There were not a lot of choices when it came to browsers on mobile. Most were really all about WAP.

In emerging markets, many people did not have a PC, so having a great mobile browser was worth even more.

Opera Mini compressed data a lot, saving people a lot of time and money. On a slow network, Opera Mini just made a lot of difference. So we are very proud that we managed to contribute to getting more people online through this technology.

With regards to saving on your mobile bill, it is all about the browser you choose. As long as you choose Opera Mini, you get the compression, saving time and money.

We aim to provide Vivaldi on mobile and we aim to make a great mobile browser as well.

But mimicking Opera Mini and the compression technology there is a bit harder. Opera Mini uses Opera Presto to load and compress pages on the server side. We were able to do this as the Opera Presto code was extremely effective and well written. As far as I understand Opera have not replaced Opera Presto for Opera Mini due to how much better the Presto code is for this use.

With respect what improvements you can expect from Opera, I do not know, but I promise that Vivaldi on mobile will be great! :)

Hi, Mrs. Jon, Greetings from Uruguay, sorry for my bad english, I am an older user from Opera, I loved Opera but recent changes have been made to look away, I have faith in Vivaldi, but I have some questions in concrete for you, We will see an application in Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, ect?, You've thought of web developers and creating a special Browers Vivaldi for web developers, with many tools?

Thanks for your support. Your English is excellent.

We aim to make Vivaldi available on mobile. Android is a definite and our goal is to support as many platforms as possible.

We will be supporting web developers as well as we can. Out of the box we support a lot of tools, as otherwise provided by the Chromium code, but we also support page actions and we will continue to develop Vivaldi to support developers as well as we can.