Ex-CEO of Opera Launches Vivaldi 1.0 Browser
Vivaldi is a browser created by the founder and ex-CEO of Opera – made waves when it was declared a year back. Unlike popular choices like Chrome and Firefox that depend intensely on extensions if a user needs to do anything beyond basic browsing Vivaldi was built as an all-in-one solution for “the Web’s most demanding users.”
In early 2015, The Vivaldi web browser first introduced as a public preview. Now version 1.0 is available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Arriving at version 1.0 after going through a 14-month beta development period, the Vivaldi 1.0 browser has been regarded to be a “modern classic”, and it is easy to see why as most of the team behind the browser happened to be former Opera engineers, and the organization itself is helmed by Jon von Tetzchner, who is co-founder of Opera Software.
Von Tetzchner mentioned, “We set out on a mission to make web browsers powerful again. Vivaldi 1.0 is both a throwback and a look ahead. It’s a ‘Modern Classic’ designed to help our users get the most out of all the time they spend with their browser.”
Actually, the capability to modify so many of the browser’s features without requiring different extensions is a big part of Vivaldi’s appeal. The user can do anything from changing their tab bar’s position to setting a background picture on another tab page, to modifying virtually all the keyboard shortcuts to your liking.
It’s a decidedly different approach from most different browsers available on the market; rather than building a lightweight browser that can become more powerful with extensions, Vivaldi hits the user with a huge amount of native features, giving user less reason to look for any add-ons.
It’s difficult to say whether Vivaldi will be able to get on with more casual users who don’t see anything wrong with Chrome, Safari, or Edge but this isn’t really expected of them. If we miss the power-user browsers of years past, then we will undoubtedly want to give Vivaldi a look.
Vivaldi is also based on Google Chromium which implies it additionally uses the Blink engine and supports browser extensions from the Google Chrome Web Store. below are a few of the things that user can do with Vivaldi that they can’t do on most other browsers:
• Tab Stack Tiling: If we have a group of tabs stacked together then we can “tile” them to view multiple tabs at once thanks to vertical, horizontal, and grid tiling.
• Web Panels: we can also add particular websites to the panel, allowing the user to open and view them from the sidebar. This can be useful for web-based chat apps, among other things, but also for news sites, Wikipedia, or just about any other page that you might want to reference without leaving the browser tab you’re currently looking at.
• Sessions: Save a set of tabs as a session that user can come back to later.
• Notes: Save notes while you surf the web and Vivaldi will remember which website you were looking at when you wrote the note. You can also save screenshots to your notes.
• Privacy: user can enable or deactivate features including Google Phishing and Malware protection, search from the address bar, Do Not Track, and more. Search Suggestions can also be allowed or deactivated and while the default search engine is Bing, a user can choose any search provider.
However Vivaldi 1.0 is no more in beta, it is still a work in progress and new features are likely in transit. The team is also working on mobile versions of the browser, but according to team Vivaldi was released for desktop users first, during a time when many software developers are designing for mobile first in order to target the largest possible user base.