Vivaldi Browser : Everything You Know About Vivaldi

Mission of Vivaldi

Mission of Vivaldi is to provide a powerful browser to meet the needs of a geek or nerd! That’s why they call it a browser for their friends, I’m pretty sure I’m one of it.

Have you used Opera browser? Not the new version, the old version like Opera 12 and below? If you have, you’ll know how powerful that browser was and how much useful many of the features that provided. But as time went, Opera browser adopted the Chromium engine and made that browser too simple and easy, removing many features from it. I still remember the quirky mouse gestures that I used in the old Opera browser. And also the window previews on tabs feature that was later adopted to Windows 7. But all that is gone, Opera now took a different direction from the past and it is not that fun to use as it used to be.

Co founder Tetzchner pointed out that there are still 20 million people using Opera 12, which was released 3 years ago. So there’s still a need for a powerful browser for the tech power user,who wants more from his browser. More over, Vivaldi started its operations when Opera’s own community, My Opera was closed, picking up the left over of the community.

User experience and Features

Vivaldi offers similar UI to that of Opera, even though modern elements are present in it. Vivaldi brings back the old Opera goodies back to users.

Speed Dial

The speed dial that you loved on Opera is also present in Vivaldi. The speed dial has a modern look is given to the speed dial. The speed dials can be changed as you did on Opera, there are also options to arrange the speed dial icons in folders too. Check out the screenshots.

Side Panel

Similar to what Opera offered on its old versions, Vivaldi has a side panel which lets you access Bookmarks, Contacts, Mail and Notes. I remember Opera having so many different options on the side bar and I liked it, and sometimes missing that on Chrome.

Bookmarks

A super organized and advanced bookmark manager, which saves bookmarks according to their niches. So many relevant bookmarks were already present in the bookmark folders, as you can see below.

Mail

Vivaldi is targeting similar mail client that came with Opera before. This option is disabled and it not yet available in the preview version.

Notes

A simple Note taking app is also included with Vivaldi, having great functions such as organizing notes in folders and saving URLs. You can directly save the websites to notes too!

Grouped tabs

You can group the tabs behind each other by dragging one over the other. One feature that was present in Opera and previous versions of Firefox too.

Bottom bar

There is a small bottom bar on Vivaldi that too reminds me of old opera days. This bar the options to adjust page zoom and some awesome page actions.

Navigation Bar colors

This one is inspired by iOS’s and Android’s status bar colors feature. The navigation bar changes it’s colors with the color scheme of the website you’re visiting, neatly executed. It looks so good, that you’ll wonder why no body ever thought of this on a web browser!

Page Actions

Page actions are something you should experience, I may not be able to explain it correctly. It has different page actions based on custom javascript. This gives a small glimpse of what Vivaldi is aiming at future – custom-developed java script actions.