John von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera browser, has released a new browser based on Google Chromium’s Blink engine.
Opera was using it’s own engine called Presto, until 2013, when the company decided to switch to Webkit, but followed Google’s footsteps when it switched to Blink.
Vivaldi also decided to follow, and even though it is based on Chromium, there are quite a few differences. The UI is just gorgeous, with a sidebar panel on the left, a menu (V icon in the top left corner) and a status bar. It also comes with a speed dial on new tabs.
The icons in the sidebar are for Bookmarks, Mail, Contacts, Downloads, and Notes. Opera was famous for integrating Mail into the browser, Vivaldi will have it too, as suggested by the second icon on the sidebar panel, but it isn’t available yet. But it says it is coming soon though.
The Notes panel allows you to take notes and add screenshots while browsing and saves it in your browser.
A unique feature of Vivaldi is “Color Tabs” which is kind of like a Chameleon, it switches the color of the tab and the address bar to the dominant color of the website in the currently active tab. Should you find that annoying, you can disable it from the settings.
The status bar on the bottom of the browser has 4 buttons: Toggle Sidebar panel, Block/Show Images, Page Actions and a Zoom bar.
Page actions offers a variety of options including a Content blocker, Filters, and more.
Download Vivaldi browser for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from the official page.
Note: It is a technical preview, and may have some bugs. But it worked perfectly when I used it, and even saved my browsing session for me.
via
Thanks Grr for the tip.