Vivaldi 3.7 with major performance improvements released

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Vivaldi 3.7 with major performance improvements released

 

Vivaldi Technologies released a new stable version of the company's web browser. Vivaldi 3.7 focuses to a large extent on improving the performance of the browser in several areas. One point of criticism that Vivaldi faced ever since it introduced the browser was that the performance of the web browser was not as good as that of Google Chrome or many other Chromium-based browsers.

 

Vivaldi 3.7 is already available. It is offered via in-browser updates, which happen automatically on most systems, but also as a direct download from the official Vivaldi website.

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Vivaldi 3.7 is the first stable version of the browser that supports Apple's latest ARM-based M1 processors natively. The new chips give all applications a performance boost, and Vivaldi Technology states that users who run the browser on M1 processor hardware will get two times the performance on Mac devices.

 

Performance has improved in several other areas. All desktop versions of Vivaldi open tabs (up to) twice as fast as before according to the release notes when compared to Vivaldi 3.6, the previous version of the browser.

 

Opening of tabs is faster now — facilitating a better user experience and increasing speed up to 2x as fast as the previous version (based on our internal benchmarks*).

 

Vivaldi itself loads faster as well in version 3.7. The company notes that the browser opens new windows 26% faster on average than before. Mileage may vary depending on the hardware of the machine Vivaldi is run on and the operating system.

 

 

Engineers have added other features to the browser, many of the amp up usability in one department or another:

• The periodic reload feature is now also available for Web Panels. Web Panels are displayed in the sidebar in the browser when used. Tabs featured the periodic reload option already, automating page refreshes. Ideal for auction sites, news sites, and sites that post new content regularly.
• A new tab stack creating option; this one creates tab stacks by host, ideal to put all those pages from Ghacks into a single tab stack for easier handling.
• The right-click context menu that appears on web pages can be customized now, similarly to how other menus of the browser can be customized. Just open Settings > Appearance, select one of the new menu options under Menu Customization, and add, remove or edit the menu entries. The menus are divided into types, e.g. audio and video, links, or text fields.
• Quick Commands bold the keyword that you searched in the new release, and it is possible to use the periodic reload feature here, by typing "periodic reload 2" to reload the active tab every 2 minutes.
• The process of updating silently on Windows has started.

Closing Words

Vivaldi Technologies is listening to its user base by improving the performance of the web browser and adding more customization options to it. The ability to edit context menu items in the browser is a welcome addition, as it allows users to create custom context menus that are perfectly suited for them.

 

 

Source: Vivaldi 3.7 with major performance improvements released

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Faster than a speeding... tab opening? Vivaldi 3.7 is here

 

Chromium-based browser boasts swifter tabs, and is an Apple M1 native

 

Browser maker Vivaldi today rolled out an update for its eponymous surfing tool, laying claim to some impressive performance gains as well as adding native support for Apple's M1.

 

Of most interest to the majority of users will be the performance gains of the Chromium-based browser, with new tabs opening twice as fast and a new window firing up 26 per cent faster than before. "We want to make sure," the company said, "that no matter how you choose to browse, your experience is faster than before."

A test drive and a chat with a senior dev

We took the new version 3.7 for a spin and, yes, it definitely feels snappier opening tabs and windows than it did on version 3.6, but we'd hesitate to call it twice as fast. Then again, we were running it on an Intel i7 with 16 GB RAM and Windows 10 tottering atop.

 

Vivaldi's own tests were conducted on an Ubuntu 18.04 PC with a 2 GHz Intel Core i3 CPU and 4 GB RAM, hardly a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination and therefore better able to show off the benefits of the tweaks.

 

Stack Tab by Hosts (click to enlarge)

 

"The changes that were made are a fundamental reworking of the way the different components of the Vivaldi UI communicate with each other," Björgvin Ragnarsson, senior developer at Vivaldi, told The Register.

 

"We streamlined the way the tabs store and access information about their state, so that they can access the information faster."

 

"This has the knock-on effect of allowing other parts of the UI know about any changes in their state sooner, so those other parts also respond to changes more quickly."

 

Because the performance improvements have been implemented in the Vivaldi-specific bits of the user interface, and so would not necessarily be common across Chromium-based browsers, a straight comparison of window and tab opening performance against the likes of Google's Chrome or Microsoft's Edge is difficult.

 

Our very unscientific test gave Vivaldi the, er, edge, but your mileage may vary depending on a variety of factors, including what you have configured your browser of choice to actually do when a new tab fires up.

Other features

Speed fans on new Apple hardware have also been gifted an M1-native version of the browser, which will be undoubtedly swifter on Apple silicon. The company laid claim to a doubling of browser performance on an M1 Mac, which seems reasonable considering widely reported benchmarks for Chrome last year that put a native version of Google's browser nearly 100 per cent swifter on M1 hardware at the end of last year.

 

Other additions in this version include periodic reloading for web panel, decluttering via a Stack Tab by Hosts function and yet more customisation possible on the browser's menus. The company has also kicked off the process to add support for silent updates for the browser on Windows. ®

 

Source