Over 15 years have passed, and here it goes again: a new browsing experience hits me! It is fun how something that is now so trivial can still surprise you. I am browsing all day, be it to perform work, search things, writing about work (I’m looking at you, e-mail) or even here. Welcome Vivaldi !!!
The deal is that I am a power-user, doing multiple things all day, and running heavy software (like databases, virtualization or server management stuff) at the same time that I need to have a bunch of browser tabs open to see what needs to be done (or send evidences of what I just did).
For my profile, I discovered that 4 CPU threads and a SSD system drive is a hard requirement, as my productivity is heavily impaired in any system missing both. And recently I also discovered that 12GB of RAM is a must. Unfortunately my current working machine has only 8GB of RAM, which will lead to frequent out-of-memory warnings and the eventual freeze of any app or the OS itself.
As the multiple browsing tabs are usually eating most of the RAM, I gave a try to diverse recent browsers to replace Chrome and its infinite hunger for memory – IE, Opera, Firefox and Neon. All had something missing or actually used more memory.
Even my beloved Opera had it’s quirks today, even considering I remember it’s version 5.10 as being revolutionary back in 2001 – yeah, I was one of those very few users who first saw tabbed browsing, and was in love with mouse gestures. You can check the first link on this post to confirm the release date and features of each Opera version to check for yourself. It’s a shame Opera could not keep up to it’s name recently, as they cut a lot of hardcore functionality in favor of simplicity. But just today I discovered Vivaldi browser, and it’s creator was part of that amazing team back in the 90’s!
Anyway, just a few minutes after finding this out, Vivaldi is up and running and I’m writing this post on it. It’s using about 190mb of RAM with 6 tabs open, while I left Chrome open for the same amount of time with just 2 tabs and it climbed from 250mb to 260mb consumed while being in the background (this is for the highest-consuming tab, of course you have to consider all but it’s a great starting point).
And Vivaldi is doing this while feeling faster, reviving my mouse gestures (try it, it’s amazing) and still bringing something new to the table: page tiling. See it for yourself:
This was a really great surprise, let’s find out what other treats this team has in store for us. Seriously, try it now!
Cya!
The Lonely DBA 