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Former Opera CEO Launches Vivaldi, A New Browser For Power Users
Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner is launching the first preview of Vivaldi today, a new Chromium-based browser that is squarely aimed at power users. Vivaldi features tools like Quick Commands for using written commands instead of the mouse, an Opera-like Speed Dial for quickly accessing bookmarks, a note-taking feature and the ability to organize tabs into stacks.
“We are making a browser for our friends,” von Tetzchner told me earlier this week. “Vivaldi is for all those people who want more from their browsers.”
Von Tetzchner told me earlier this week that he thought he would happily continue using Opera after he left the company. But then he decided to get back into the browser game after Opera decided to kill off its Presto engine and go after a different user base. “Opera was built around a community and a close connection with its users,” he told me. “I felt like that connection had been severed.”
“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.
I’ve used the preview of Vivaldi as my main browser for a full day now and the team is definitely on the right track. The design emphasizes simplicity, but there are also a few playful touches. The tabs and menus change color according to the dominant color in a site’s favicon, for example (you can turn this off, too). Like earlier versions of Opera, Vivaldi puts a menu strip in the left corner of the window to allow you easy access to your bookmarks and other browser tools.
There are lots of nifty little features already built in, including tab previews and the ability to move tabs to any corner of the browser window. At first, I thought the Quick Commands tools (which works a bit like Apple’s Spotlight) wouldn’t be all that useful, but once you start using this feature, it quickly becomes part of your routine, and I actually missed it when I went back to Chrome.
It’s still missing a couple of features I need for everyday use, though. There is no bookmarks bar yet, for example. You also can’t install any extensions yet, either (though Vivaldi already has the hooks for that built in and will enable them in one of the next previews).
https://vivaldi.com
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/vivaldi-the-four-browsers/
Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner is launching the first preview of Vivaldi today, a new Chromium-based browser that is squarely aimed at power users. Vivaldi features tools like Quick Commands for using written commands instead of the mouse, an Opera-like Speed Dial for quickly accessing bookmarks, a note-taking feature and the ability to organize tabs into stacks.
“We are making a browser for our friends,” von Tetzchner told me earlier this week. “Vivaldi is for all those people who want more from their browsers.”
Von Tetzchner told me earlier this week that he thought he would happily continue using Opera after he left the company. But then he decided to get back into the browser game after Opera decided to kill off its Presto engine and go after a different user base. “Opera was built around a community and a close connection with its users,” he told me. “I felt like that connection had been severed.”
“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.
I’ve used the preview of Vivaldi as my main browser for a full day now and the team is definitely on the right track. The design emphasizes simplicity, but there are also a few playful touches. The tabs and menus change color according to the dominant color in a site’s favicon, for example (you can turn this off, too). Like earlier versions of Opera, Vivaldi puts a menu strip in the left corner of the window to allow you easy access to your bookmarks and other browser tools.
There are lots of nifty little features already built in, including tab previews and the ability to move tabs to any corner of the browser window. At first, I thought the Quick Commands tools (which works a bit like Apple’s Spotlight) wouldn’t be all that useful, but once you start using this feature, it quickly becomes part of your routine, and I actually missed it when I went back to Chrome.
It’s still missing a couple of features I need for everyday use, though. There is no bookmarks bar yet, for example. You also can’t install any extensions yet, either (though Vivaldi already has the hooks for that built in and will enable them in one of the next previews).
https://vivaldi.com
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/vivaldi-the-four-browsers/
