Vivaldi 2.0 review: The modern Web browser does not have to be so bland

[nir]

Vivaldi says about half of all the 2.0 features come from user feedback and suggestions.

 

The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. In fact, whenever a new bit of hardware arrives that somehow lacks a way to browse the Web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a browser on it.

 

Despite their ubiquity, though, there remains very little difference between common Web browsers. Most people seem to get by with whatever was installed by default, and no wonder. Modern browsers like Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features—why bother with one over the other?

 

But this uniformity is its own choice, the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that Web browsers should be like children of the Victorian Age: seen and not heard. Or, maybe more specifically in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard.

 

Fortunately for those of us who would like something different, something we can bend to our will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi.

 

Vivaldi first came upon the Ars radar in early 2015. And given that uniformity mentioned above, it stood out quickly. Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, the primary goal seemed to be rebuilding the browser that Opera once was—the power user's browser. And by the time its 1.0 came around the following spring, Vivaldi appeared to be on the right track. This could be the cure for the common browser.

 

Roughly a year and a half later, Vivaldi has recently hit the 2.0 milestone. You can download the latest version from the Vivaldi site or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS. And at first blush, perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. This release is a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened.

 

While the version number here does mean something, it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood, Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates, and, like Chrome and Firefox, it issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing as part of 2.0 actually trickled in over time, rather than arriving all together in one monolithic release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.

But first, a confession: I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the Web, and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full-page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the Web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard. Yes, those are all standard features in Vivaldi.

 

But if you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big-name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways, and if you'd like to have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying.[...]

Read the full long article at the source page.
 

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