Faster than a speeding... tab opening? Vivaldi 3.7 is here
- Reference: 1615986905
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/17/vivaldi_3_7/
- Source link:
Of most interest to the majority of users will be the performance gains of the Chromium-based browser, with new tabs opening twice as fast and a new window firing up 26 per cent faster than before. "We want to make sure," the company said, "that no matter how you choose to browse, your experience is faster than before."
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A test drive and a chat with a senior dev
We took the new version 3.7 for a spin and, yes, it definitely feels snappier opening tabs and windows than it did on version 3.6, but we'd hesitate to call it twice as fast. Then again, we were running it on an Intel i7 with 16 GB RAM and Windows 10 tottering atop.
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Vivaldi's own tests were conducted on an Ubuntu 18.04 PC with a 2 GHz Intel Core i3 CPU and 4 GB RAM, hardly a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination and therefore better able to show off the benefits of the tweaks.
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Stack Tab by Hosts (click to enlarge)
"The changes that were made are a fundamental reworking of the way the different components of the Vivaldi UI communicate with each other," Björgvin Ragnarsson, senior developer at Vivaldi, told The Register .
"We streamlined the way the tabs store and access information about their state, so that they can access the information faster."
"This has the knock-on effect of allowing other parts of the UI know about any changes in their state sooner, so those other parts also respond to changes more quickly."
Because the performance improvements have been implemented in the Vivaldi-specific bits of the user interface, and so would not necessarily be common across Chromium-based browsers, a straight comparison of window and tab opening performance against the likes of Google's Chrome or Microsoft's Edge is difficult.
Our very unscientific test gave Vivaldi the, er, edge, but your mileage may vary depending on a variety of factors, including what you have configured your browser of choice to actually do when a new tab fires up.
Other features
Speed fans on new Apple hardware have also been gifted an M1-native version of the browser, which will be undoubtedly swifter on Apple silicon. The company laid claim to a doubling of browser performance on an M1 Mac, which seems reasonable considering widely reported benchmarks for Chrome last year that put a native version of Google's browser nearly 100 per cent swifter on M1 hardware at the end of last year.
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Other additions in this version include periodic reloading for web panel, decluttering via a Stack Tab by Hosts function and yet more customisation possible on the browser's menus. The company has also kicked off the process to add support for silent updates for the browser on Windows. ®
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[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-fires-up-performance-2/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFI1qst5sGvuHrWw@xsaIQAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFI1qst5sGvuHrWw@xsaIQAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/17/stack_tabs_by_host.jpg
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFI1qst5sGvuHrWw@xsaIQAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Snap Snap
Tab opening is indeed very much snappier. Weirdly it's even faster on my diddy RPi 4B then on my grown-up computer. If only it had embedded FTTP then filling the page might be snappier still ;-)
I'm presuming they haven't got round to an officially supported ARM64 repository yet. It's a pain not being able to update via apt.
But otherwise thank you for possibly the best Chromium based browser to run alongside Firefox. It pains me that trying ween folks off Chrome/Chromium itself is as hard as in the old days when IE6 was the bane of any sentient IT person's life.
Tab opening? Really?
Seriously, is it really that important to have new tabs open one millisecond faster, given it will take the same old amount of time to download the hundred GBs of various JavaScripts from the dozen of different websites? (Talking about the average users here, not the few savvy people using NoScript.)
To me that sounds like marketing fluff, bragging about a nice-sounding feature actually not really changing anything, but which will eventually sound valuable if you insist hard enough.
Re: Tab opening? Really?
If the UI is really better at dealing with the "On mouse down I'm going to shuffle all the UI elements underneath you so that mouse up (and the click) are recorded against the wrong element"
Re: Tab opening? Really?
Not sure about marketing fluff, but definitely a bit desperate. What next, a better shade of white?
Re: "What next, a better shade of white?"
Now Gluten Free.
Re: Tab opening? Really?
One useful thing would be to re-introduce text menus. So many applications now use their own idiosyncratic sets of icons that mastering multiple applications is becoming like reading ancient Egyptian. Because multiple separate cultures combined into a single Egyptian empire, ultimately multiple hieroglyphs represented the same concept and single hieroglyphs represented multiple concepts. The result was (as now) inevitably confusion, not clarity (which is what icons are supposedly for).
"no matter how you choose to browse"?
I choose to browse without Chromium.