A new stable release of the innovative Vivaldi browser is out. Version 1.3 of the browser includes lots of changes including themes, better privacy settings and improved mouse gestures. Let's explore these changes.
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Most of these changes and improvements might be familiar to all Winaero readers, since we covered them one by one in the past. Here's what the new version offers to the end user.
Themes
Vivaldi 1.3 is the first release which brings the ability to customize browser themes to the stable branch. Besides the pre-defined color schemes, you can also create your own theme. It can be based on any of the default themes or you can use your own colors.
To try out this feature, you need to open the browser's preferences and go to Themes:
Pick the desired theme you like or click the plus button to define your own theme:
See the following article to see all built-in themes in action: Themes in Vivaldi
Mouse gestures
Vivaldi supports editable mouse gestures since version 1.2.470.11. Version 1.3 supports about 90 browser actions the user can bind to a gesture. The user can quickly define his own gesture with a few clicks in preferences.
The browser reads custom gestures very accurately and also displays the performed gesture in the status bar! This is really useful.
Privacy options
Vivaldi 1.3 allows leaving less fingerprints when browsing the web by adjusting the appropriate settings in the Privacy section of its settings. There you will also find the new WebRTC section. As you may already know, you can establish voice and video calls using WebRTC in a web browser. It is powered by HTML5 and does not involve plugins or browser addons.
Tab hibernation in Linux
Finally the long awaited tab hibernation feature is available in the stable branch of the browser. The Tab hibernation option will allow you to purge all inactive tabs from memory and make the browser use less RAM. If you have many tabs open, simply right click on the active tab and choose 'Hibernate Background Tabs'. This will immediately free up more resources as your tabs are 'put to sleep'. Switching over to any of them will bring them back to life.
You'll find the complete change log in the official announcement HERE.
You can download Vivaldi 1.3 using the following link:
What do you think about Vivaldi? Will you give it a try? Or are you already using it?
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The browser is nice. Developers put a lot of efforts to make great customization options, though “under the hood” it is based on Chromium&Blink as many other browsers like Chrome 28+, Opera 15+ and Yandex.Browser.
Opera has some nice features like VPN (proxy), ad blocker and battery saver. Also the added RSS reader at was present in Opera 11,12+.
Vivaldi has great customization options, hibernate tabs and gestures.
So i think they both deserve attention. Also one thing i didn’t like about vivaldi, that on highDPI screens, on Windows 10 with scaling set to 150%, its interface becomes blurry, and it hurts eyes during long usage.
Operas interface in the same conditions is a bit better. Though it is more a problem of Windows, which they didn’t fix on Anniversary Update (device manager and some other native windows look awfully blurry under 150% settings and full hd native screen resolution), and i think they won’t fix it on Redstone 2 and Redstone 3 as they blame app developers, and they blame MS.
You can fix the blurry UI in Vivaldi settings. It has the separate interface scaling option specially for the case you mentioned.