An Overview of Screenshots of Vivaldi, the New Web Browser for Power Users
Tired of Chrome? Tired of not being able to customize Safari? Wish Firefox was a little better? Vivaldi , the new web browser built on Chromium, wants to dispel your aversion to boring, modern, regular browsers with a highly customizable browser. Let’s see how it stacks up.
What is Vivaldi?
Vivaldi is built by a company led by former Opera CEO Jon von Techner . That reputation on Opera Street should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from Vivaldi in general. Vivaldi is a browser built for people who prefer a long list of mass market attraction features. It’s a browser for people who love to tinker and tweak and make the most of every little feature they have available. It’s still based on Google’s open-source version of Chrome, Chromium, which means you’ll have access to pretty much all popular browser extensions (although, sadly, not some essential elements like LastPass ).
When you first launch Vivaldi, it isn’t much different from any other browser. But what sets it apart from the rest of the package are all the little features hidden in it.
Vivaldi has tons of ways to organize your tabs
Whether you love tabs for organizing pages or hate them for being distracting, tabs aren’t going anywhere. Vivaldi introduces several new tricks we haven’t seen in browsers before to make them easier to manage, including a handy stacking system and a helpful preview feature.
Tab Stacks and Stack Mosaic Organizing Tab Overloading
One of the more forward-thinking things about Vivaldi is how it handles tabs. As always, you can open many tabs and they will line up horizontally. If you prefer a little more organizational control, Vivaldi has a feature called Tab Stacks.
To use stacks of tabs, simply drag one tab on top of the other. This will create a stack. You can then hover your mouse over that stack to individually select the tab within it. You can also right-click a tab and select Tile Tab Stack to see a grid of all the pages in the stack at once, nicely laid out so you can pick one to read. You can change the appearance of this grid to your liking. You need to tinker a little with this, but it’s useful for anyone who likes to keep tons of tabs open on many sites at once.
If you tend to browse many of the same sites every day, you’ll also love the Vivaldi session feature. When you have a set of open tabs that you want to save, click on File, then Save Open Tabs as Session and give it a name. You can then reopen that set of tabs, customize exactly the way you saved it, simply by clicking File and choosing Open Saved Session.
View quick thumbnails of your open tabs
Tab stacks may be the most striking tabbing tool in Vivaldi’s shed, but not the only one. It also offers several ways to get an idea of the content hidden behind a tab without actually switching to it, such as previewing the Windows taskbar. You can hover over an individual tab to get a visual preview, or you can click and drag the tab menu down to display thumbnails of all your open tabs.
Quick commands are like miniature highlighting of your browser
Press F2 anywhere in Vivaldi and you will get a quick command menu. Here you can search by the names of your open tabs, search for something in your bookmarks, or simply search for a keyboard shortcut. Thanks to this, you can launch or search for whatever you need quite efficiently without even clicking on the mouse.
Create your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures
Don’t like the default keyboard shortcuts? No problem, it is very easy to view and change them. Just open the preferences panel and click the Keyboard tab. Here you can view and customize every action in Vivaldi using any keyboard shortcut.
Vivaldi also has built-in mouse gestures. You can quickly create your own navigation gestures, such as opening or closing tabs, moving forward or backward, and opening new tabs or opening a link in a new tab. These gestures are triggered either when you hold down the right mouse button and “draw” a gesture with the mouse, or when you hold down the Alt key and do the same. For example, you can draw an L-shape to fast-forward, or click left to go backward.
All About Sidebar, Vivaldi’s Most Useful Feature
The sidebar is one of Vivaldi’s best features. You can open it by clicking on the icon in the lower left corner of your browser. The sidebar contains four different functions, all of which are useful, but two are quite special.
Web panels host two sites side by side
Web Panels are perhaps the most useful feature in the sidebar. This is similar to the picture-in-picture view of your browser, so you can view two sites together, side-by-side, and this is especially useful if you are comparing two stories by opening a linked link on the same page in the sidebar (or viewing that something like Imgur or Reddit, where you want the main site in the sidebar and the new site next to it.) This works best for mobile-optimized websites, as the sidebar view will almost always be mobile-optimized. friendly version. To add a new site, simply click the “+” icon in the sidebar and enter the URL.
Take quick notes about the pages you view
The sidebar also has a pretty useful notes feature. You can store as many notes as you like here, as well as add links and images. Oddly enough, it doesn’t automatically populate the links section with your current url and doesn’t open the page you were viewing when you reopen the note. Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to be able to take quick notes right from the browser without installing another extension, then you’re done.
Quick access to all your bookmarks
This may sound familiar to Firefox users, but one click opens all of your bookmarks in a pane to the left of the browser window. The built-in search function is a nice touch, especially if you have a lot of information but nothing that other browsers don’t – it’s just well done and presented.
View all your recent downloads
The next option in the sidebar is your list of current and completed downloads. You can click a file to open it, or click the brush icon to clear the cache, click any item to open it directly in the default application for that file type, or click any stopped or failed download to try again.
The new tab page is familiar and customizable
The first thing you’ll see when you open Vivaldi is a new tab. You’ll find a familiar speed dial of your favorite websites, and you can quickly delete pages, click ddrag to move them, or add new sites by clicking the + sign. A tab at the top of the page also lets you access your bookmarks and history. You can even create a second (or third, fourth, etc.) Speed Dial Page for more specific needs. For example, you can have one for work and one for normal viewing, and you can switch between them whenever you want. If you go to preferences (File> Preferences), you can change the background color, number of columns, and more.
Quirky, useful features not found in Chrome or Firefox
Even at first glance, Vivaldi works differently than other browsers. Here’s how to figure out some of the odd (but still useful) features.
Zoom slider easily enlarges and shrinks pages
At the bottom of Vivaldi, you’ll notice a zoom slider that does what its name implies. This is especially useful on sites with very little text. If you are more familiar with keyboard shortcuts, pressing Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) and the + or – keys also work like in any other browser, but the slider is quite useful and more detailed. use.
Page Actions Customize the look and feel of your website
Page actions are a weird and wonderful way to transform pages for easy reading or just your preference. Click the “<>” icon in the lower right corner and you can select a range of filters to view the page. Some options are more useful, such as a built-in content blocker that hides ads and tracking cookies, or a CSS debugger that helps you bypass broken scripts. You can also do strange things, like changing everything to grayscale, switching the font to monospaced, or highlighting what your mouse is focusing on.
Kill all images with one click
Don’t like heavy, slow loading images? Or just want to save some bandwidth while browsing over a slow or tethered connection? Click the image icon in the lower right corner, then select the No Images option.
Customize the look and feel of Vivaldi
You can also customize Vivaldi’s appearance, but you may still be surprised at how much you can change that. In many ways, this is similar to what you’ll find in Chrome, but it’s impressive how much you can change, even for people familiar with Chrome options. Here’s a list of what you can do:
- Choose a light or dark theme
- Adjust the size of the UI
- Remove interface completely
- Show or hide the status bar
- Color the tabs depending on the website you are viewing, or change the color of the entire top bar
- Change the background color of the start page or add a background image
- Adjust the number of Quick Dial tiles on the start page
- Move the tab bar up, left, right or down
- Move the panel left or right
- Move the address bar up or down (for some reason)
- Show or hide the bookmark bar
- Choose whether to display text, an icon, or both on the bookmark bar.
You can also turn off pretty much every feature in Vivaldi, so if something gets in your way or you just don’t like it, you can completely remove it and never think about it again.
There are other features in Vivaldi that we haven’t covered here, but you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the browser. After using it last week, I found the tab stack and tab mosaic to be incredibly useful, but the fact that LastPass is currently not working in Vivaldi prevents me from using it all the time. While Chrome extensions are supported, that doesn’t mean they all work well. Vivaldi is still a rookie, and just because he came out of beta doesn’t mean that he still has no bugs. PCWorld tested its performance and found Vivaldi to be quite slow compared to other browsers. In my experience, page rendering seems a little slow compared to Chrome, but it is not very noticeable.
However, Vivaldi has many options in terms of functions. If you want to quit Chrome but are not a Firefox fan, or consider yourself a power user and want the browser you have customized to perfectly suit your needs, it is worth taking a look at.