About ten months ago a team led by the former CEO of Opera Software launched a technical preview of a new web browser called Vivaldi. It has some of the key features that helped make Opera stand out, including the Speed Dial shortcuts for favorite websites. But Vivaldi is aimed squarely at power users: it supports gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and a bunch of customization options.

Now Vivaldi has graduated from technical preview to beta. You can download the latest version from Vivaldi.com.

vivaldi_02

New features include support for extensions, geolocation, private browsing, and HTML5 H.264 video playback. Sure, those are features that have been available in other browsers for ages, but now that they’re baked into Vivaldi, this beta browser is starting to feel a little more like it could actually compete with Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or Edge.

Earlier preview builds had also added some features that weren’t included in the initial launch, including support for automatic updating of the browser, support for high-resolution displays, a task manager, and on-demand image loading.

Vivaldi offers a bunch of options that let you make the browser look and behave the way you want: you can adjust the color of the user interface, customize your start page, position browser tabs on any side of the browser window (or hide them altogether), create custom keyboard shortcuts, and use Page Actions to change the behavior of websites with filters or tools.

According to TechCrunch, Vivaldi is also thinking about building a mobile version of the web browser, but that probably won’t happen until Vivaldi 1.0 for desktops is released.

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13 replies on “Vivaldi web browser for power users goes beta”

  1. I have tried Opera, Qupzilla, Iron, Chrome, Vivaldi and I didn´t like any of them. Now I use Pale moon but I don´t like it. It is slow and startpage is terrible. So I am stuck with the shit. I miss the old Opera but now it is a chrome based browser so it is not Opera anymore. Please giv us Opera back and VIVALDI IS THE SAME Google shit-

  2. Been using it since day one. It has improved greatly since then. The amount of work they have put in such a short time is crazy. Yes more things can be improved but good things take time and it has not even been out to public for a year yet.

  3. so you can move tabs anywhere but just not under the url bar??

    All kinds of customizability, but not the kind that ppl really wants; home button positions/back forward buttons/status bar/menu buttons….really??

    Can someone just give me pale moon but make sure that it loads every site correctly and works flawlessly on Windows 10? Pale moon for some reason just can’t be set as the default browser on my windows 10 PC

    1. I’m honestly not sure people are interested in those customizations. I have not seen one person customize a browser where page navigation buttons position is important. Also, I jist use keyboard for back. And tabs under the URL just doesn’t make sense…

      1. Perhaps you’ve never met people who don’t understand why every other browser’s UI followed chrome copying opera ever since chrome first emerged.

        Before chrome, tabs were under url or they gave you the option to be above or under. Now every browser just puts it above

        1. But the point is, less and less people are customizing their browser UI.

          1. true no one really wants to customise their browser UI, some just want their browser UI to be pre-chrome copying opera, i.e firefox pre-australis

  4. I’ve never had a “speed” issue with any browser… my issue is usually with memory leaks, like Firefox reaching 2.3 GB and then crashing ungracefully.

    i I much hope that:
    – Vivaldi is 64bit
    – can handle unloading the contents of older open tabs, keeping only the URL until revisit.

    – doesn’t insist on loading every single tab when you open with a large tab set

    I mean anybody wants their content fast, a “power user” can hardly be defined by that. Customizability, yes, well that’s already a given by creaky old Firefox.

    Well, I’m actually running the 64bit Firefox Nightlies out of pure desperation… While it does have some issues, it succeeded at fixing the memory problem already! I opened an ungodly amount of tabs just to test, and when I checked Task manager to see how far above 2.3GB of RAM usage it had gone, it showed just under 600MB. So, the difference in RAM used by my tabs and what is just leaking out of Firefox 32 is friggin huge!

  5. Tried it out – it’s quite fast. has an almost 1000 mark improvement over chrome running peacekeeper on the same system. I’m interested…

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