We get it. It’s fun, feature-packed, and developer-friendly. Let’s download it and try it out. After a quick session of installation and customisation, Vivaldi was up and running on my work machine. I typed in “gizmodo.com” in the address bar and hit Enter. I waited. Nothing. Can it be a server failure? I opened a new tab and typed in “google.com” and hit Enter again. Nothing showed up.

After a quick internet connection check with Google Chrome, Vivaldi finally displayed the websites. Hey, this browser is ridiculously slow. Based on my smartphone’s timer, the Vivaldi Browser loaded webpages at 1/4 of the speed of Google Chrome, and it’s so slow that at some point you thought it stopped working. Normally it stayed as blank page for 10 seconds or so before jumping to the URL path destination. Don’t take my word for it. Check out some of the users’ feedbacks:

Even the official Vivaldi forum, aka “energetic and supportive user community”, has documented this unresponsiveness. Here’s an excerpt from user terere:

Opening pages is also slow. At first its gets stuck in the middle of the status loading bar, the suddenly the whole page is loaded but its definitely the slowest browser, slower than Chrome, Explorer, Firefox or Opera in my system when loading pages. Scrolling pages also seems to lag a bit.

Can it be a hardware-related issue? Maybe an isolated problem for PCs? As Vivaldi is based on Chromium, there should be no excuse for poor performance. If Chrome can deliver, so can Vivaldi. Besides being ran on a snail pace, there aren’t much on the surface that makes Vivaldi truly unique. Surely it can change appearance and position of tabs, take side notes, enter quick commands, stack and tile tabs on a single screen. Yet most of these features are covered by plugins of other competing browsers, like the ever-popular Chrome and Firefox. Placing the emphasis on lightning fast browsing shortcuts is definitely defeated by the laggy performance. This is not looking good for the newcomer.

Still, Vivaldi is easily the most interesting browser entry in recent months, which gained media praises about the extend of controls it gives web surfers. The new browser can be a power user’s blessing on paper, not to mention it’s supported by previous Opera co-founders and CEOs Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Tatsuki Tomita – that’s a quality seal.

With a strange lag affecting some computers, Vivaldi is off to a rough start. Hopefully the company will fix this soon enough to retain its early adopters.

Have this been the case for you too? Share the frustration so the problem can get solved FAST! Follow the blog for more delicious tech tips and opinions.

Download Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/

Image credit: Vivaldi