Vivaldi, a new Chromium/Blink based web browser aimed at power users, has reached Technical Preview 3, receiving numerous improvements such as data import from all major browser, on-demand image and plugin controls, optional native window decorations for Linux and more.
Vivaldi (which is built using open source technologies, but is not open source software) is a web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies, whose chief executive and founder is John von Tetzchner, former Opera CEO and co-founder.
The app is available as a technical preview for now (so it's not considered stable yet and some features are missing) and includes various features which for power users, such as tab stacks, mouse gestures, a note-taking feature, Quick Commands to easily search through settings, history, open tabs and bookmarks and more.
Changes in Vivaldi Technical Preview 3:
- added optional Native window support for better integration with Linux;
- added Tab stack and tab selection tiling in vertical, horizontal and grid organization;
- improved Notes feature both visually and functionally. Now you can add more attachments and screenshots (in my test, adding screenshots doesn't work on Linux);
- added support for more mouse gestures, including link gestures;
- added more keyboard shortcuts and improved keyboard shortcut editing;
- added Unread tab indicator to both tabs and tab stacks;
- added data import from all major browsers;
- added on-demand image and plugin controls so that you can load only what you need;
- added Background tab progress indicator;
- improved both Fast Forward and Rewind functionality;
- significantly improved Spatial navigation;
- added more options to the download dialog. It now has both “Save” and “Save As” in addition to “Open”;
- improved Page actions;
- added a new option to the bookmarks bar, so that you can have a very compact bookmarks bar with icons only;
- added full screen reminder option;
- increased the number of supported languages to 40;
- various performance optimizations and bug fixes.
Since it's pretty difficult to move the Vivaldi browser window without native Linux window decorations, I highly recommend enabling this new option (Tools > Settings > Appearance > "Use Native Window"). Enabling it should also fix the missing app window shadows under GNOME (Shell).
This should be the last technical preview release and the next major milestone will be Beta. There are still some key features that need to be implemented, like a built-in email client, sync and extensions support and hopefully at least some of these will make it in the first beta.
Download Vivaldi
Download Vivaldi (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux: 32bit/64bit deb and rpm)
Note that by installing any Vivaldi version (tech preview, snapshot, etc.), the package automatically adds the Vivaldi stable repository (at least in Ubuntu/Debian) and if you install multiple Vivaldi versions, it may result in duplicate repositories - this can be fixed by deleting the extra vivaldi-*.list repository file from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.
If you encounter bugs, report them HERE.
