Vivaldi Web Browser

Following the announcement of Microsoft Spartan - a newest browser  few day back, here comes   a brand new browser vivaldi from former CEO of Opera Software - Jon von Tetzchner.

It’s been three-and-a-half years since the von Tetzchner resigned as Opera’s CEO after co-founding the company back in 1995. He reappeared almost exactly a year ago when he launched Vivaldi — a social network and forum site for exiles from Opera’s now-closed community site.

vivaldi browser appears to be an attempt by Tetzchner and his team to remake what they believe Opera should've been. Before it became a browser, Vivaldi was an online community for dispossessed Opera users after Opera Software shut down its community site in late 2013.

the team has worked on the vivaldi browser for the last year-and-a-half, and while this is clearly still an early preview and many features are still missing, the browser feels pretty polished already. Many of Vivaldi’s features were clearly inspired by Opera, and von Tetzchner freely acknowledges that — but then Opera decided to do away with many of these after it made the switch to WebKit (and later Blink).

The new browser, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, is still in its early days, but offers a number of features that loyal Opera users may remember. Vivaldi, the browser, also contains many Opera-like traits including Speed Dial, a built-in mail client (still under development), and built-in note taking.

Vivaldi also has some new features. Multiple tabs can be combined into one for easy browsing of related sites. For example, if you were doing research online you could group all the tabs on that topic into one to save space.

Another feature allows you to take notes right in the browser, along with screenshots, which makes it easy to remember exactly why you thought a page was important.

“There are a lot of browsers available for the crowd that doesn’t want a lot from their browsers,” von Tetzchner argued. “We are going for the kind of user who spends a lot of time online, keeps a lot of tabs open and likes to work efficiently with a lot of content.

The Vivaldi team decided to go with Chromium as the foundation of the browser. The team was obviously too small to write its own engine from scratch, and while von Tetzchner also looked at using Mozilla’s engine and WebKit, he decided to go with Google’s project in the end.

“Going with WebKit didn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “And going with Mozilla — we felt that fewer people were using it. They were two good choices in any case, but we went with the safer choice.”

Right now, the browser is only a technical preview, but there are big plans for Vivaldi in the future. In the coming months, there are plans to add sync, mail support, better performance and extensions.