Most modern web browsers are designed with an emphasis on simplicity, since the browser itself usually takes a back seat to the sites you’re visiting.
But Vivaldi is a web browser designed for folks who want to customize their browsing experience and/or get more done. And the developers keep adding more features aimed at power users. The two latest examples? Accordion Tabs and Command Chains, which make their debut today with the release of Vivaldi 4.1.
The Accordion Tabs feature is a new style for managing browser tabs. When this option is selected, you can group a set of browser tabs together in a way that allows you to expand those tabs with the click of a button, or shrink them to the space of a single tab with another click.
In other words, they expand and contract like an accordion, while presumably making less noise (unless you forget to mute a tab with auto-playing media).
Accordion Tabs are an optional feature for Tab Stacks. If you’d prefer you can continue to use Compact or Two-Level groups (which expands all tabs on another row when you click on a stack).
Vivaldi’s new Command Chains functionality allows you to run multiple commands one after the other. You can create custom commands to, for instance, open a set of websites and then switch them to tiled/split-screen view so that you can see multiple pages at once.
Users can create custom chains from 200+ browser commands and then trigger a chain using assigned keyboard shortcuts.
It’s the sort of feature that I suspect most people will never use… but which could be a huge time saver for the folks that take the time to set up chains for frequently-visited sites and/or frequently-used commands. For example, I usually visit about 15-20 websites when compiling Liliputing’s Daily Deals posts. With Command Chains, I could open them all with a single keystroke and then arrange them on my screen.
Other changes in Vivaldi 4.1 include a minute counter in Reader View which suggests how long it will take to read content, and silent updates that can be downloaded and installed in the background with no need for user intervention (other than restarting the browser from time to time).
Does this browser support hardware accelerated video decoding in Linux?
I miss the stack tabs add-ons in Firefox. When that stopped being supported (4 rows visible of 80 tabs, 1200 in all), I became less enthused by other web browsers.
It is still on my computer. for memory and reference, but “still”