Vivaldi closes in on the cure for the common browser

Review: Ultra customization, clever tab management breaks from Chrome, Firefox.

The Web browser is likely the most used piece of software on the average computing device. Yet despite its ubiquity, there is relatively little competition in the browser space. These days even experienced users would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the major offerings. Internet Explorer’s new Edge incarnation is slightly different, but Firefox, Chrome, and even Opera are indistinguishable both in appearance and features available.

There may be some small differences, but for the most part a Web browser is a Web browser is a Web browser.

This is especially true when there’s no Web browser. The rise of the embedded browser in mobile apps has very nearly eliminated the need for a dedicated one if you spend most of your time in mobile applications. But the disappearance of the browser is not a bad thing. The point after all is not the browser—it’s the Web it accesses.

As the argument goes, the more the browser gets out of your way, the better it is. Simple, reasonably cross-platform uniformity between today’s browsers helps to get more people online. So this boring, seemingly crippled Web browser of today may improve the overall Web browsing experience for the majority.

But this argument implies that the “average” person using a Web browser needs to be spoon fed as simple of an experience as possible. Google’s infamous man-on-the-street interviews demonstrated that many people have no idea what a Web browser is or even that they’re using one, but it did not demonstrate that they don’t know how to use a browser. Most people have no idea how a car works either, but they still manage to drive one.

Judging by the user interface design and disappearing features, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have very little regard for the intelligence of their users. If you work with the Web the way these options want you to, consider yourself lucky.

On the other hand, if you find yourself installing a dozen or more extensions just to bend the browser to your will, you might want to check out the newcomer to the browser scene—Vivaldi. This powerful, customizable Web browser doesn’t try to dictate how you browse the Web… and it just hit version 1.0.

Vivaldi: A browser for everyone

When I looked at Vivaldi’s early beta release last year, I wrote that Vivaldi billed itself as “‘for our friends,’ which would seem to mean for power users.” Since then, though, I’ve changed my mind. Vivaldi is a browser for anyone and everyone seeking an alternative to the current trend of dumbed-down software.

That said, Vivaldi clearly has a soft spot in its heart for those of us with fond memories of Opera 12. In fact, Vivaldi’s creator and CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner’s primary goal for Vivaldi is to build the kind of browser that Opera once was—powerful, customizable, and fast.

While Chrome and Firefox continue to infantilize the browser by removing features (RSS buttons, toolbars, protocols in the URL bar), Vivaldi leaves most of the decisions about what to show and not show in the browser up to you.

Straight out of the box Vivaldi looks very familiar, albeit a bit more colorful than most browsers.

Vivaldi’s defaults still closely match what Chrome and Firefox use, but pretty much the entire interface and behavior of Vivaldi can be customized to your liking. For example by default, like Chrome and Firefox, Vivaldi does not show the protocol (http:// https://, ftp://, etc) in the URL bar. But head to the settings, and you’ll find a little box that says “show full URL.” Enable it, and you’ll get your URL back. (See Firefox and Chrome developers, that wasn’t so hard was it?) Vivaldi even goes a step further and shows you the number of requests a page is making and the total size of data that’s downloaded as it’s downloaded.

When returning from the relatively staid world of Chrome and Firefox to Vivaldi, what’s striking is how colorful the experience is. By default, Vivaldi adopts the color of the page in question (the color selected appears to be related to the link color the page uses). Otherwise, Vivaldi’s user interface isn’t all that different from other browsers. What’s changed is that you can completely rearrange this default interface, docking tab bars, URL bars, sidebars, and more wherever you want. You can even hide the entire interface to focus on just the page you’re reading.

Beneath its unique skin, Vivaldi uses the same rendering engine you’ll find in Chrome/Chromium and Opera: the Blink rendering engine. This is Google’s fork of WebKit, and in practice it means Vivaldi will render pages just like Chrome.

Similarities end there, though. Vivaldi’s interface does not rely on the same code you’ll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact, the interface is written entirely with Web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. Javascript, React, Node.js, Browserify, and “a long list of NPM modules” create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, “Vivaldi is the Web built with the Web.”

Early beta releases of Vivaldi occasionally felt a little slow, with some lag in the UI. With 1.0 all of that is gone. The interface is every bit as snappy as any other application. The interface code also runs in its own process with “well defined, limited access to the rest of the browser code” so there’s no more security risk with Vivaldi’s interface than any other (there’s possibly less risk even).

Another big and welcome change from the early preview releases is support for Chrome extensions. Some extensions, particularly those that involve manipulating the UI in some way, may behave a bit strangely. I could never get Google’s Hangouts extension to work, and the SpeakIt extension crashed Vivaldi until I deleted it by hand. But popular extensions like Adblock and Lastpass worked just fine. That said, I’ve only felt the need to install two extensions (uBlock Origin and Vimium) to supplement Vivaldi’s basic offerings. Thanks to the customization and feature-rich base, there’s very little Vivaldi can’t do straight out of the box.

Installing Chrome extensions in Vivaldi is no different than in Chrome.

Customize all the things

When you first open up, Vivaldi looks like every other browser (again, albeit more colorful). The default UI layout isn’t cluttered with buttons; it’s in no way overwhelming. In fact, you’ll have to dig into the preferences pane to discover the real power here.

The first place to head after you install Vivaldi (and import your settings and bookmarks from your old browser) is the preferences panel. Here you’ll find the wealth of customization options. You can customize keyboard shortcuts, set up multi-touch gestures, show or hide all the toolbars and sidebar, even hide the entire UI if you like. You can even set up a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle the UI elements when you need them and hide them when you’re reading.

Customizing keyboard shortcuts in Vivaldi.

You can position the tab bar wherever you like and control where new tabs appear (to the right of the current tab, always at the far right, or next to related tabs). Other tab options include whether or not to use the colorful background effect and a very useful option to automatically close tabs when you double-click them.

You can likewise control the location of the address bar and enable something called fast forward and rewind. This is a clever little feature that allows you to jump to the next page in a sequence. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom Vivaldi will, with an extra press of the spacebar, automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will take you back to the first page you loaded in a given tab.

Once you have the interface tweaked to your liking, it’s time to dig into some of Vivaldi’s slightly hidden power user features like the ability to turn off image loading for faster browsing over slow connections. You can toggle the image options using the button in the status bar or even render a page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option, you’ll love Vivaldi.

Vivaldi also has a quick launcher, which takes its concept from the old OS X app, Quicksilver. Pull up the Quick Launcher window with a keyboard shortcut and then search for open tabs, windows, and frequently used commands. If you have a lot of tabs open, the Quick Launcher is the fastest way to find exactly which tab you want without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Find what you want quickly with Vivaldi’s quick launcher.

Tabs

Vivaldi’s attention to detail is perhaps most evident in the variety of tab browsing configurations. To start, there’s the ability to put the tab bar wherever you like (I discovered that, against my initial instincts, I quite like the tab bar at the bottom of the screen) and pin frequently used sites. But there’s much more than that.

Vivaldi embraces and extends the Tab Stacking feature that Opera pioneered. To create tab stacks, you just drag one tab and drop it on top of another. The two are now overlaid in the tab bar, which saves some screen real estate and makes it easy to keep related tabs together in nice organized clusters. In fact, Vivaldi will do this for you if you right-click a tab and select “Group Similar Tabs to Stack.” There’s also a command to save your entire current window of tabs as a “session” that you can reopen later.

Hovering over a Tab Stack brings up thumbnail previews of all the tabs inside that stack.

The problem with Tab Stacking is that isn’t all that useful if you have to hunt through the tiny tab icons to find what you’re after. Don’t worry though, Vivaldi has clearly thought this through. There are quite a few ways to find the particular tab you need in the stack (or stacks). If you hover your mouse cursor over the Tab Stack, Vivaldi will show you a Windows-style preview thumbs, which you can then click to select the tab you want. You can also open the Quick Commands window and search for the tab you want; hit return and Vivaldi will take you to the tab in question.

The most interesting thing to do with Tab Stacks is to use one of the predefined layout options to view all the pages at once. Select the tab stack you want to inspect and then click the rectangle icon in the status bar. Vivaldi will then attempt to fit all the tabs in that stack in a grid. This works best with four or fewer tabs, obviously, otherwise you end up with really tiny tabs. With four (or fewer) tabs, though, it’s possible to tile them and still have them be usable. There are a variety of layouts available, including left-right, top-bottom, and others.

Combine the multi-tab view with Vivaldi’s notes feature, and you have one of the best tools around for online research. Vivaldi’s notes feature lives in the sidebar and links your notes to a webpage, along with any images (like a screenshot) or files you want to attach. Unfortunately, right now there’s no way to export these notes. It’s still a useful feature, but it will be even more so when you can get your notes out of the browser for use in other applications. Von Tetzchner says the group will get to the export feature eventually, adding they “want people to be able to import and export things for maximum flexibility.”

The screenshot above shows that while Vivaldi isn’t cluttered or overwhelming by default, you can definitely make it that way. Still, for me to get from that image to the one below takes only two key combos.

One other thing worth mentioning about Vivaldi’s vast array of tab tools is the ability to right-click a tab and select “Hibernate Tab” or the more powerful “Hibernate Background Tabs.” In today’s Web of endlessly watching JavaScript just waiting to pop up that newsletter signup form, there’s no better way to save on CPU cycles and battery life than hibernating all the tabs you’re not using. Vivaldi also includes the Chrome task manager if you’d like to figure out which tab is making your fans spin up.

The sidebar has also gained a new trick since Ars looked at the beta release. It’s known as a Web Panel, and what it does is create a long narrow window to the side of the page. Vivaldi cleverly asks sites for the mobile version of the page and loads it in this sidebar. This works best with sites that offer a good mobile version, but it’s a very simple way to keep news feeds, Twitter, or other frequently updated sites at hand while you browse other pages in the main window. Naturally, you can also customize the Web Panel version to be as wide or skinny as you like. You can even tell it to request the desktop version of a site instead of the mobile if you so choose.

Problems

Vivaldi is not perfect. Few 1.0 releases are. For all its customization, the main toolbar is curiously immutable. With so many keyboard shortcut and gesture-based means of navigation, having dedicated back, forward, home, and reload buttons feels decidedly quaint. It turns out the lack of customization here is simply a matter of priorities. It didn’t make the list for 1.0, but von Tetzchner says it’s on the short list of future improvements.

Another shortcoming Web developers should be aware of is the Chrome developer tools panel. While capable in their own way, in my experience Chrome’s tools are lacking compared to what Firefox has to offer in its Developer Edition. That’s not Vivaldi’s fault, but the browser has an odd quirk. Currently, it keeps developer tools in their own window. If you have a laptop that’s tight on screen space, this is not nearly as useful as keeping dev tools attached to the window you’re inspecting. This is also a known issue that will be addressed in future releases.

Beware that it’s quite possible that Chrome extensions with keyboard shortcuts will conflict with Vivaldi’s built-in shortcuts as well. For example: Vimium, which adds Vim-like shortcuts to Vivaldi, can clash with Vivaldi’s own single-key shortcuts (if you enable them that is; by default Vivaldi doesn’t use single-key shortcuts).

There is one other potentially huge missing feature in Vivaldi, too—there’s no mobile version. While a mobile version is on Vivaldi’s roadmap, for now the project is focusing on the desktop.

The final problem worth mentioning is that Vivaldi consumes a bit more resources than Firefox, but this is true of Chrome as well (the situation seems to indicate something lower-level than Vivaldi itself). Whatever the case, Firefox is still a bit less resource intensive than either Vivaldi or Chrome when comparing all three in stock mode with no extensions installed.

Venture capital free

Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those seeking to raise tons of venture capital in hopes of a huge IPO (or these days a massively profitable sale). While there probably are venture capitalists who’d love to invest in Vivaldi, they’ll never get the chance. Vivaldi isn’t taking funding. Instead, initial funding has come out of von Tetzchner’s pocket. Like other browsers, Vivaldi hopes to make some money from searches and some money from prominent placement in Vivaldi’s Speed Dial features.

This works out to about $1/year per user of profit for Vivaldi (roughly the industry standard). So long as Vivaldi the company stays lean and can maintain a reasonable user base, it will never hurt for money and will never feel the pressure of venture-backed companies.

Money isn’t the only thing Vivaldi seems to disdain. Vivaldi also doesn’t seem particularly interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox, or Chrome. That’s a good thing because without an OS to pre-install it or the brand recognition of Google and Firefox, Vivaldi is probably never going to get anywhere near that size user base.

As such, Vivaldi will likely remain where it is—in the province of the power user. This is something for people who want to do more with the Web than other browsers allow out of the box.

The future

The freedom to do what it wants without worrying about market share means Vivaldi’s roadmap looks radically different from its competition. Top of the to-do list for von Tetzchner is adding an e-mail client to Vivaldi. In fact, in Vivaldi’s settings screen, you’ll find a few tools related to the coming e-mail features (like keyboard shortcuts to open Mail and Contact panels), though none of them do anything just yet.

Once upon a time, having a mail client in Opera felt like bloat, but with Thunderbird fading fast that’s no longer true for many. If an e-mail client is the last thing you want in a browser, however, fear not. Given Vivaldi’s customization track record, there’s a good chance it won’t take much to turn such a feature off and ignore it.

If you miss the old Opera, the Opera of the Opera 12-era, then Vivaldi is for you. And if the current crop of browsers leaves you wanting more or you end up installing a dozen extensions to get things the way you like them, Vivaldi is well worth a look. But even if you never use this new browser directly, Vivaldi looks to have enough innovative new features that it’s very likely some will end up in whatever browser you do use.