Vivaldi 1.5 Becomes the First Browser That Can Control Your Home's Smart Lights

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Vivaldi Technologies released Vivaldi 1.5 today, the latest version of their phenomenal and well-received Vivaldi browser, which through today's release has added support for a crucial feature known as delta updates, but also become the first browser in the world to support out-of-the-box integration with an IoT device.

 

First and foremost, let's talk about the most important feature: Delta Updates. If the term is new to you, delta updates is a type of update mechanism that other browsers such as Firefox or Chrome have supported for years.

 

Starting with Vivaldi 1.5, instead of downloading the entire update package, Vivaldi can tell what internal modules and components have changed, and only download updated versions of those components.

 

This way, the update process is much faster, and users save bandwidth by downloading 100KB instead of 20MB of data.

Better tab management

Another feature introduced in version 1.5 is better tab management. Since Vivaldi is still a relatively new browser, for a long time, users weren't even able to drag tabs from one window to another.

 

 

With Vivaldi 1.5, users not only can drag tabs across different windows, but they can organize tabs in groups, and transfer multiple tabs across windows at the same time.

 

Even better, there's also a right-click menu option that allows users to perform these actions without having to actually drag anything by hand.

Some users criticized Vivaldi in the past and considered it a low-end browser because it didn't support tab dragging. Now that it's here, those critics must admit that Vivaldi is looking more and more like a solid Chrome and Firefox replacement with each new version that gets released.

Enter Reader Mode

Browser extensions like Instapaper and Pocket have shown the world that stripping a page down to its title and text is often the best way to read news articles.

Starting with version 1.5, Vivaldi, just like Firefox, now has a Reader Mode, which users can access on pages with large text-based content, by clicking an icon that appears in the URL bar, as shown below.

 

Add page screenshots to Notes

A lesser known Vivaldi feature is its Notes application, which comes built-in with the browser, and can be accessed through the sidebar.

Starting with Vivaldi 1.5, users can take screenshots of the current page, and add it to a note. This is very useful when you want to remember a small detail on a page that receives updates on a regular basis, and the content you want to remember might get removed or buried under other details.

 

Philips smart lights integration

Last but not least, Vivaldi engineers worked on adding support for Philips Hue smart lights.

By default (can be disabled), Vivaldi will change the browser toolbar color based on a website's dominant color.

 

The Philips Hue Vivaldi integration takes this color and tells your home's smart lights to adjust the lighting environment with a shade of that color, synchronizing your home with the color of the sites you're visiting. Pretty cool feature if you don't find it too distracting.

To enable the Philips Hue integration, just visit the Themes section in the browser's settings.

 

 

And in closing, after Google Chrome and Opera (all Chromium-based browsers) announced built-in support for Chromecast, Vivaldi joined their ranks as well.

 

Video: Turn on the lights with Vivaldi Browser

 

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