While Vivaldi’s reviewers are still raving about its recently launched version 4.0, with Wired magazine describing it as “the web’s best browser”, the team behind it has delighted online privacy and security advocates with two brand-new features.
Vivaldi’s latest update lets users expand tab groups with Accordion Tabs and run browser commands in a sequence with a single shortcut using Command Chains.
These capabilities complement Vivaldi’s recent feature-set additions—including Vivaldi Translate, the betas of Vivaldi Mail, Feed Reader, and Calendar—and help advance its mission of building a browser that is “powerful, personal, and flexible” and “adapts to you, not the other way around.”
“We’re determined to provide a browser that works for anyone while putting their privacy first. And with these additions in version 4.1, Vivaldi is giving users a real alternative offering that is more individualized and meets the end user’s requirements,” Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Vivaldi Technologies, told 150sec.
Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera Software, says they want people to browse freely “without being tracked or spied on” for vested interests.
“That’s exactly why we collect no usage data and hope that people will move away from the Big Tech who regularly uses people’s data unethically.”
He explained that his company is spending huge amounts of time customizing every slight detail gradually to make sure users can edit the menus to their liking and create their own keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures.
Tab Stacks, one of Vivaldi’s iconic features, allows users to organize their tabs in a folder with a sort of overview.
For instance, if they have 40 to 50 tabs at any one time, they can put them into different Tab Stack groups, depending on how they relate to each other.
In a blog post announcing the newest capabilities, the Vivaldi team wrote that users can now choose from three different Tab Stack styles: Compact, Two-Level, or Accordion.
“With Accordion tabs, tab groups can expand and minimize when active, keeping tabs at hand without overcrowding the Tab Bar,” they said, adding that Command Chains enables users to browse more efficiently by chaining together any of Vivaldi’s 200+ browser commands and execute them in a sequence using a single shortcut.
In Vivaldi 4.1, silent updates for Windows have been enabled for both single users and standalone installs and an enhanced Reader View has been made available on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers to provide a clutter-free reading environment.
A minute-counter has also been added, to show the approximate length needed to read the content.
Vivaldi currently has over 2,300,000+ active users, and Tetzchner says Vivaldi aspires to educate and inspire more people to make the best of their browsing experience and help them navigate the web much more quickly and easily.
The commitment to put users first is reflected in the fact that the company has no external investors and is owned by its employees so that they have the freedom to “listen to our users and, together with them, build the browser they deserve.”
“It’s very fulfilling to build software that people like. You have to work for every user and win them over, and we do this by giving them exactly what they want,” said the Icelandic-Norwegian programmer and entrepreneur.
