Vivaldi 2.0 review: The modern Web browser does not have to be so bland

The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. In fact, whenever a new bit of hardware arrives that somehow lacks a way to browse the Web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a browser on it.

Despite their ubiquity, though, there remains very little difference between common Web browsers. Most people seem to get by with whatever was installed by default, and no wonder. Modern browsers like Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features—why bother with one over the other?

But this uniformity is its own choice, the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that Web browsers should be like children of the Victorian Age: seen and not heard. Or, maybe more specifically in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard.

Fortunately for those of us who would like something different, something we can bend to our will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It’s called Vivaldi.

Vivaldi first came upon the Ars radar in early 2015. And given that uniformity mentioned above, it stood out quickly. Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, the primary goal seemed to be rebuilding the browser that Opera once was—the power user’s browser. And by the time its 1.0 came around the following spring, Vivaldi appeared to be on the right track. This could be the cure for the common browser.

Roughly a year and a half later, Vivaldi has recently hit the 2.0 milestone. You can download the latest version from the Vivaldi site or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS. And at first blush, perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it’s merely 2.0. This release is a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened.

While the version number here does mean something, it’s also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood, Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates, and, like Chrome and Firefox, it issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I’ll be discussing as part of 2.0 actually trickled in over time, rather than arriving all together in one monolithic release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.

But first, a confession: I’m probably a bit biased. I’ve been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the Web, and at this point it’s difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn’t have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full-page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the Web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard. Yes, those are all standard features in Vivaldi. But if you’d like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big-name browser makers, if you’d like to customize your browser in myriad ways, and if you’d like to have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying.

Vivaldi 2.0

Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly the new syncing feature.

Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions, and some, though not all, of your settings between installs.

Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of its focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools, and the company did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read, your data. It isn’t sending any data to third-party servers at all; everything is in-house.

While I don’t actually have a use for sync until there’s a mobile version of Vivaldi, I’ve been testing Vivaldi’s syncing features for over a month now. While syncing everything between my machine and my wife’s machine, I have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works.

Vivaldi’s von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, Web panels, themes, and more.

As welcome as sync is, there’s something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn’t exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist but that it isn’t ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it’s safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority.

In the meantime, there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool than before. One feature that I haven’t seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner, some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which forced Vivaldi’s engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process.

Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes. (As an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select “Hibernate Background Tabs.” This will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing, this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?)

This is the third time I’ve covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig in to some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisit some previous nitpicks. In my review of Vivaldi 1.0, I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, like no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar.

I’m happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved nearly all these problems plus a slew of smaller ones. (The lingering exception is, of course, that lack of a mobile version.)

After the sync and speed improvements, Vivaldi 2.0’s feature list becomes a browser tinkerer’s wonderland. Vivaldi’s MO has always been to continually refine and fine-tune existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features, and tweaks that it’s tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the Vivaldi blog for more details and the complete list of everything that’s new in 2.0.

My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi’s Tab Tiling feature. Perhaps one of Vivaldi’s most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to view several tabs in a single window that’s split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago. I can’t imagine browsing the Web without it.

In Vivaldi 2.0, you can now resize each tiled tab’s window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions.

But wait—there’s more!

Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for “floating” Web Panels. Web Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi’s sidebar. Push the button and the panel expands. By default, panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases, when a panel opened, it resized the main window to fit both on-screen. In the day and age of responsive design, that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed. Even if it didn’t, resizing the page could be annoying.

Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there’s a new setting to enable “floating” panels. Turn that on, and panels will not resize the main window, they’ll overlay it and float on top of the content. That does mean they’ll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There’s also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you’re done with it, the panel will get out of your way again.

I said covering content is “rarely” a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and there are times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You’ll have to set the keyboard shortcut (by default it’s blank), but it’s there if you need it.

Another nice added feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you’ve nicknamed your bookmarks, you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname, and Vivaldi will automatically open that page—you don’t even need to hit return. As soon as you type out the nickname, the page opens.

One feature of Vivaldi I’ve always ignored is the Web Panel. I’ve never really seen a use for it. But in 2.0 there’s a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions, which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the “+” icon to add a new Web Panel, and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most.

I’m still not a big user of Web panels, but thanks to the suggestions, I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use-case. For example, I have the devdocs site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up, I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing my main browsing session in any way.

This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it’s extremely customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming, and if you don’t spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features.

For example, I’ve been using Vivaldi for years and have always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I would always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably, this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner, and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off “Alt key for Main Menu.” It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it in a sea of options.

How to get the most out of Vivaldi That small experience highlights what’s probably Vivaldi 2.0’s biggest challenge—convincing people to put in a little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, “There is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you’ll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there’s something you don’t like let us know, we’re unique in how we listen to users.”

To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend the time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what’s possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi’s settings page to see what you can change. And, of course, Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi. So if there is something it can’t do out of the box, you always have extensions. (To date, I’ve only found the need for two extensions.)

So, the first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. To do that, you can either click the gear icon at the lower-left part of the screen… or click the main menu, go to Tools, and then settings… or type F2 and then “sett” and hit return… or hit Alt-P… or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. (Just kidding, visualizing it doesn’t work. Yet.)

As you can see, there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, as the browser will work however you’d like it to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I’ve set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can make happen without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium, to add some shortcuts Vivaldi doesn’t offer out of the box). And for such users in Vivaldi 2.0, there are naturally a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with: for example, there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right.

That’s how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working are both possible in the same piece of software. Simply put, once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi, you’ll find a level of fine-grained control you won’t find elsewhere.

Consider, for instance, privacy in the context of Web searching. Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing, or whoever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type. Because you’re searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn’t know if you’re entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well.

Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but, in every browser I’ve used, the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it’s either on or off.

In Vivaldi, you get more control than that.

The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box, nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I’ve tested.

If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it’s on, you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar (e.g. URLs, mostly) would never be sent on to a third party, but, when you search in the search box, you would get suggestions.

You can fine tune this a bit further. I don’t want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don’t like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So, I turn off suggestions in the URL bar but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type “arstechnica.com,” no data is sent, and I get no suggestions—I just go to the Ars site. But if I type “d arstechnica,” I’ll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the “d” prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo.

Think that’s it? Well, you can further refine this to restrict search to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant (all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box). You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you’re leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There’s even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by default, the latter will use DuckDuckGo).

While it’s not new in this release, there’s another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don’t have to click the button (there’s a keyboard shortcut as well). For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, taking you back to the beginning of your most recent browsing history for that tab.

You can also cosmetically alter Vivaldi’s interface to suit your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks, and so on.

The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I’d also suggest looking over the user forums for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi, and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the most active, helpful people I’ve encountered in the software world. If there’s a way to do something with Vivaldi—and chances are pretty good there is—they seem to know.

In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy, Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi (and, evidently, you definitely can have one), you’ll have to join the community and get involved.

Conclusion Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect. Its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I’d like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client. (Most of these I know are on the roadmap.) But this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want while continuing to focus on the details that have made Vivaldi a power user’s delight from the start.

When I asked why a tech-savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi’s advantage lies in that user-centric focus. “It’s about the focus on you and your requirements,” he says. “Other browsers are removing features, we’re adding them. There’s more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi, so make it yours.”

So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go utilize my keyboard shortcuts and drum up an email. Might as well submit one more request for that Vivaldi mobile.