There’s been a trend in the browser market in recent years – streamline and strip out features that ‘nobody’ uses, let someone else add them back via extensions or plugins.
This makes sense for those who only use the basic features, but for power users, developers, geeks and tweakers, all those plugins just slow down the browser, add bloat and risk causing the whole thing to fall over like a washing machine with a brick in the drum (google it).
Now, however, there’s Vivaldi.
The beta is super-fast but still with tons of features and configuration options, even before it’s been officially released.
Stacked tabs, tiled browsing (side-by-side comparisons anyone?), keyboard shortcuts, customisation settings for EVERYTHING, the ability to use arrow keys to move between links (instead of just tabbing), etc, etc.
All your settings are belong to us…
There’s also a really cool feature where the tab changes colour to match the favicon of the website you’re viewing. Plus, Sync and a minimal email client are in the pipeline.
Vivaldi is built from JavaScript – React and Node.js, plus other – and is based on the same Blink engine (WebKit fork) used by Google Chrome and Chromium.
It’s closed source, but you can’t have everything…
It’s like having the good old Opera back (before it lost the plot), with all the best bits of Firefox and Chrome as well.
The developers say they’re only just getting started – expect much, much more from this app.
