jonsvt

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.