As each jostling brand throws its surface-scrubbed privacy parcels out to the roadside gathering with gleeful abandon, open hands grab at the shower of generous gifts. The privacy bandwagon is in town, and the cart is pretty crowded as it rounds the corner onto High Street. On the JetStream 2 test, Vivaldi (177.4) scored a couple of points higher than Microsoft Edge (171.9) and Google Chrome (174.4).In Bodhi Linux, Vivaldi 4.3 forced direct connections to certificate authority domains before allowing visits to encrypted pages. On my M1 MacBook, Vivaldi didn’t stutter once rendering a page, irrespective of dozens of active tabs and windows and consumed at least 20% less memory than Microsoft Edge. That perk also allows it to go toe-to-toe with its peers in performance. Since Vivaldi is based on the same engine as Chrome, it supports extensions from the Chrome Web Store. If you spend most of your time in the browser, this integration can come in especially handy as you can quickly access your inbox and appointments from the sidebar or the status bar at the bottom. These apps feature just about everything you’d expect, including offline support. You can either plug in third-party services, such as Gmail and Outlook or sign up for Vivaldi’s privacy-focused alternatives. If you’ve got Philips Hue lights, Vivaldi can control those too as you browse the web.įor people who are looking to escape Big Tech altogether, Vivaldi recently added its in-house mail and calendar clients. Or you can leave it to its default look like me, which itself is quite clean, and automatically adapts to your current web page’s dominant color. What sets Vivaldi apart, though, is its built-in editor that lets you modify these themes down to the last pixel, or build one from scratch. Like most browsers, Vivaldi comes with a catalog of themes you can pick from to switch up the colors of your tabs, accents, menus and more. You can hide this sidebar entirely or tweak it to eliminate any clutter and include only the panels you need. It sounds like a lot, but that’s where Vivaldi’s strengths kick in. You can also pin websites here like a messaging service’s web app and have a multi-window view. There’s a sidebar on the left where, by default, you will find a host of mini apps, such as a calculator, an RSS reader, a window and tab manager, a calendar, a translator, and your history and downloads. In addition to the address bar, Vivaldi houses a couple of sections you can personalize to fit your browsing style. You can switch between tabs by scrolling on your mouse, adjust their appearance, position the tab bar on any of the four sides, and more. If you’re unsatisfied with Vivaldi’s default tab management despite the layout choices, you can further customize it to your preferences. The ability to add another row of tabs is particularly clever if, like me, you often find organizing and keeping track of tab groups on other browsers clumsy. You can stack them in a layout where you have two rows of tabs or clump them together in an expandable primary tab or on top of each other to save screen space. Most browsers let you group tabs, for instance, but on Vivaldi, you can choose to nestle them in a way that works best for you and your device. But as you begin to operate it, you come across features that make it unique. When you first fire up Vivaldi, it appears like any other web browser. What’s better than one row of tabs? Two rows Vivaldi strikes a balance between putting the features you need front and center and hiding the rest inside optional sidebars and menus. What’s more impressive is that it doesn’t make for an overwhelming first-time experience, or require a crash course to learn. Even after a week of use, I’m still discovering new functions every day. It offers the most versatile set of tools and options to fine-tune how the browser works and looks. Vivaldi’s biggest strength is that it’s a browser you can make your own. And it turns out, it might be the Chromium browser to beat now that Edge is out of the picture. Of late, however, Vivaldi’s on an update spree that added a series of functions compelling me to give it a shot. Vivaldi has always been the underdog and an offbeat alternative to more popular options like Brave and Edge.
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