We've seen a lot of these press releases reprinted as articles about Vivaldi this week, but despite their claims more features != catering to power users.
I'm a web developer, I spend at least 10 hours a day in a web browser. Usually several of them. Usually with several windows spread across several desktops, and a large number of tabs in each window. If you want to appeal to me, use resources efficiently. So far every metric I've seen of Vivaldi shows it is a memory hog.
They tout the idea that the browser comes with features which are only available as extensions in other browsers. That's not a feature. The browser should come with only absolutely essential features and the rest should be extensions. I don't want my browser bloated with a ton of features I'll never use, and neither does somebody else who likes a different feature set than me. By trying to cater to everyone at once, you're actually making your product terrible for everyone.
I'm fairly impressed with Vivaldi and I appreciate its roots greatly. I'm just a bit uncomfortable with its proprietary nature. I'm not a free software zealot, but I do make the effort to use free software when I can.
Their main website isn't loading for me at the moment (edit: must have been the network I was on, I'm connected to a different one now and it loads fine), but you can get a good deal of info from the Github. It's under active development and while I wouldn't replace Firefox with it yet I may very well at some point.
Every new tab opened takes at least 28 MB, and pages with higher complexity use more. The progression is linear.
Simply put, they can put in as many features as they like, if they don't get the memory use in check, it'll be even less of an alternative.
However, since it is based on Blink, they're stuck with the memory profile of the exact same rendering engine as in Chrome/Opera 15, and can barely differentiate themselves by providing a different UI.
This is just the same thing as 10 years ago when everyone was making "browsers" based on an iexplore engine webview. As much as i want someone to take up the baton of Opera 12, this is not done by repeating the mistake Opera ASA did and forking Chromium.
Great to see Vivaldi getting traction and attention. I did not agree with the direction Opera was taken after they switched from the Presto rendering engine to Blink. Many of the features focused on power users were thrown out, and when users complained to Opera, they were told to wait on extension developers to fill in the gaps. Many people prefer not to have to install multiple extensions and therefore have to trust multiple extension developers. I hope Vivaldi is successful in filling the void left by the changes to Opera.
I have to say that I tried Vivaldi a couple of weeks ago and found it too alien and unintuitive for my taste, both on the Mac and under Ubuntu.
In comparison, "mainline" Opera is (at least for me) not just faster than Chrome, but also refreshingly free of bundled crap (including Google logins and the like).
I'm a web developer, I spend at least 10 hours a day in a web browser. Usually several of them. Usually with several windows spread across several desktops, and a large number of tabs in each window. If you want to appeal to me, use resources efficiently. So far every metric I've seen of Vivaldi shows it is a memory hog.
They tout the idea that the browser comes with features which are only available as extensions in other browsers. That's not a feature. The browser should come with only absolutely essential features and the rest should be extensions. I don't want my browser bloated with a ton of features I'll never use, and neither does somebody else who likes a different feature set than me. By trying to cater to everyone at once, you're actually making your product terrible for everyone.