Vivaldi is a popular Chromium-based browser that offers some pretty cool features, with its tab management being unmatched by any other browser; If you ask me, that is. 😆
Alongside the usual web browsing tools, Vivaldi also ships with a solid Mail client and calendar, which many users like to take advantage of to streamline their workflows.
For me, just the web-browser part is enough to go about my day. In a recent announcement, its developers introduced a new release, Vivaldi 6.8, which has landed with some useful upgrades.
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Vivaldi is a non-FOSS solution, with the UI side of things being closed source. We cover it because it's available for Linux.
🆕 Vivaldi 6.8: What's New?
As this is a major release, I have divided the article into two key areas that have taken Vivaldi to the next level.
The first is the user experience (UX) side of things, which features some really useful improvements that ought to make the lives of Vivaldi's users easier. The second one focuses on the revamped mail client that features a ton of new enhancements.
UX Refinements
We start off with the updates to Break Mode, which now simulates guided breathing, allowing people to decompress thanks to the de-stressing/relaxing effect it has when they sync up their breathing with what's going on screen.
Bringing Vivaldi on par with other Chromium-based browsers like Chrome and Brave, we finally have real-time display of tab memory usage, which, according to the developers, updates periodically, compared to what other browsers do, showing just the initial load.
Seeing as we are on the topic of other Chromium-based browsers, Vivaldi now has support for importing Chrome extensions, with those being disabled right after importing completes, allowing you to choose which ones to enable.
When using the Address Field, you can now directly switch to an open tab by using the new Tab Switch feature. This is supposed to prevent the opening of duplicate tabs, but, in my case, I was pretty annoyed that I couldn't find a way to disable this behavior.
You see, I have to open tabs of the same domain multiple times to do my work, and this new feature makes open tabs appear on the top of the search results each time I try to do so. (I know this is a pet peeve.)
And, finally, we have the improved Tracker and Ad Blocker, which now has support for adding hosts file, lowers the minimum time between rule updates to 1 hour, and updates the snippets used by the ABP anticv list.
Vivaldi Mail 2.0
As part of a major revamp of the mail client, there's now the ability to send a Quick Reply from the email interface, allowing for quicker email responses from a compact compose window.
There's also the newly added ability to undo an action on Vivaldi Mail, which can go back up to 200 of a user's past mark as read and trash mail actions.
Starting with this release, Vivaldi Mail will now automatically download 30 days of mail from any added accounts in a bid to improve search results, and enabling you to preview 1–3 lines of any mail without opening it.
Of course, you can change the download interval from the settings menu, or even disable this behavior all-together if you don't think you need it.
The interval options range from opened messages, a day, a week, a month, a year, and the most storage-heavy, all messages.
For disabling prefetch, you can use “opened messages”. You can access the settings for it by following this flow: Settings > Mail > Sync Options.
🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements
To wrap this up, there are a few other changes that you should know about:
- Better tab performance.
- A new Quick Command for creating a new Workspace.
- Support for two more languages, Georgian and Sinhala.
- Fix for breakage of compact stacks when using horizontal scrolling tab bar.
- Various fixes for crashes occurring during text input, closing tab, and more.
You can learn more about those by diving into the detailed release blog.
📥 Get Vivaldi 6.8
You can get this release for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The official website hosts all the relevant packages.
Vivaldi 6.8
💬 Are you going to install this release? Let me know in the comments below!
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