Vivaldi introduces Delta updates
Vivaldi announced a major change coming to the browser's update mechanism that will make updates a lot smaller in the near future.
Up until now, each new version of Vivaldi had to be downloaded in full to update an older version -- be it a stable release or a snapshot release.
While that may not have mattered that much to stable users, there were only a couple of stable releases this year so far, beta users may have noticed it because of the increased frequency in which snapshots are released.
So, basically, whenever a new update was released the full version of Vivaldi had to be downloaded to the system.
Vivaldi Delta updates
Starting with Vivaldi version 1.5.626.8 on Windows, that is no longer the case. Vivaldi switched to delta updates in that build which means that only the actual changes are downloaded.
You are probably wondering how big of a deal that is. While it depends on what is being released, the first snapshot update that Vivaldi released is less than 200 Kiloybte in size.
While that does not introduce any major new features, that's certainly an improvement over download 40 or so Megabytes for browser updates.
Users benefit from this a lot, as updates are downloaded faster and thus also installed faster. This means less wait time for an update to be applied to the browser. Also, bandwidth is saved in the process but that is probably only important to businesses and not home systems considering that Vivaldi updates are far and few between.
Vivaldi on the other hand benefits from delta updates as well. Besides making customers happy, the company saves on its bandwidth bill. Imagine having to deliver a 40 Megabyte update to one million users, or an update that is just 4 Megabyte in size.
The bandwidth needed would drop from 40 million Megabytes to just 4 million Megabytes (40 Terabyte to 4 Terabyte).
One caveat is that delta updates are only available for Windows versions of Vivaldi currently. The company announced however that it is working on bringing the delta update feature to Mac and Linux versions of the Vivaldi web browser in the near future.
Closing Words
Many major browsers, Firefox and Chrome for instance, make use of delta updates already. It is good to see Vivaldi introducing the functionality to the web browser as well.
Now You: What's your take on the change and the direction Vivaldi is heading in general?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.