Vivaldi was created after the developers of Opera browser thought that the browser was lagging behind to become a fast browser on limited hardware. Thus, a lot of improvement was implemented in Vivaldi to make it more appealing to users.
Speed and Stability
Vivaldi is based on the Blink engine (used by Chromium and Google Chrome) which makes it fast and stable. However, it still depends on the user’s device configuration.
To address performance issues, Vivaldi offers lazy loading which hibernates individual tabs and Tab Stacks. When ‘Lazy Load Restored Tabs’ is enabled, all restored tabs except pinned tabs (can be included through settings) are lazy-loaded. When you hibernate a tab, the browser will discard that tab and replace it with an empty tab. This will reduce the browser’s memory usage. To exit from hibernation, you just need to revisit the tab.
With Vivaldi 3.7, new tab loads twice as fast
The latest update on Vivaldi 3.7 further improves browser loading speed. Now the browser tabs load twice as fast as compared to the previous version.
User Interface
By default, it appears just like most browsers: a tab bar on the top, an address bar below, and a status bar. Now, to make Vivaldi much more different from other popular browsers, various features have been added and enhanced.
Default Vivaldi UI
There is a separate search bar where it allows you to choose a search engine to find stuff. A left-corner menu icon that points to a familiar sub-menus and provides access to useful settings. The side panel on the left lets you access some useful extras such as Bookmarks, Downloads, History, Notes, Window, and Web Panel. The Status bar includes some other features.
Customization
A plethora of options to customize your Vivaldi
Customization is pretty common to most browsers but Vivaldi takes it to the next level. To begin with, start by adjusting the tabs layout which is a notable feature. You can the change tab position, either top, left, right, or bottom. Also, there is a setting where you can change where new tabs should appear. You also have the ability to change the minimum width of active tab, or to change the appearance of Page Load Progress indicator. And a lot more plethora of options for power users.
Various options for themes
Vivaldi also offers themes but not just that, it adds a theme scheduler where you can make the browser change themes at specific hours. For example, you can set a Light theme during the morning at 7:00 AM and a dark theme at 9:00 PM. Aside from that, Vivaldi has support for Razer Chroma and Philips Hue devices. With this unique integration, these devices will adapt to the color of whichever site you are surfing. This makes your browsing experience more enjoyable than ever.
However, the customizations don’t stop there because you can also change the keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, and quick commands so that everything works the way you want.
Lastly, if you share your computer with other people and they have their own taste on how it should look and feel, Vivaldi offers a profile manager where all users can share a single installation. Each user profile can have a different set of tabs, bookmarks, history, extensions, etc. as well as its own settings and look.
Productivity
Aside from those powerful customizations, Vivaldi offers features that boost productivity which is found to be very useful to most users, these are Notes Panel, Web Panel, and Tab Stacks.
Notes Panel
With Vivaldi, you can also add notes and take screenshots while surfing the web. A nice feature where you can save your thoughts and ideas on sites you visit.
Notes Panel
Web Panel
Web Panel allows you to add your favorite websites as separate Web Panels to make them easier to access. Clicking a Web Panel will allow you to simultaneously view its content alongside the tabs in your browser’s main window.
Tab Stacks
As you open more tabs, every tab gradually becomes smaller, less recognizable, and out of place. Vivaldi addresses this problem by introducing “Tab Stacks”, a distinct feature that allows you to group similar tabs together into a stack. You can stack tabs by similarity, multiple selections, and by drag and drop.
Vivaldi’s Two-level Tab Stacks, an enhancement to prominent Tab Stacks feature
Tab hoarders can easily create multiple tab stacks at once with ‘Tab Stack by Hosts’. This new feature will look for all tabs and stack those from the same host. In conjunction with this, Vivaldi introduces a ‘Two-Level Tab Stacks’, where stacked tabs appear below the parent tab. Actually, the parent tab isn’t a real tab, it’s just a website’s name so that users can easily identify the tabs being stacked together. Interestingly, multiple tab stacks can be combined as one Tab Stack further reducing tab clutter. But be careful when you do this as it can slow down your browser due to tab overloading.
Other productivity features
Some other useful features are easily accessible in the Status Bar such as Hide Panel, Break mode, Sync, Capture Page, Page tiling, zoom slider, and the ability to load or unload images on sites you visit.
Data Privacy and Security
Most importantly, Vivaldi takes security and privacy more seriously than others. It blocks websites and advertisements from tracking your activities on the web. With a built-in Adblocker, you can stop intrusive ads more. Like most Chromium-based browsers, Vivaldi integrates Google Safe browsing to protect you from malware and phishing sites.
Furthermore, if data privacy is your concern, Vivaldi strictly adheres to government policies and is committed to zero-tracking. Thus, without your personal data, nothing can be sold. The only Vivaldi does is on your installation profile which has a corresponding user ID that is stored on your device. Vivaldi sends a secure message (HTTPS) to their servers every 24 hours, this contains your browser’s unique ID, browser version, your hardware’s CPU architecture, screen resolution, and time since the last message. Don’t worry, IP addresses of users are anonymized by removing the last part of IPs. The purpose of this is to know how many active users in a geographic location.
Final Thoughts
Vivaldi is indeed a feature-rich browser for its genuine innovation on customization, functionality, and security of which its developers should be proud of. To the users of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and Safari, try Vivaldi now as it has the features you loved amongst these browsers, it’s even better.
images from vivaldi.com
