A new version of the Vivaldi web browser is now available for download with an improved pop-out video player.
Vivaldi 2.11 is the first major desktop update of the settings-packed web browser to be released this year and, accordingly, is carrying plenty of improvements in this build.
Among them, a refined Pop-out video mode. Vivaldi’s implementation of this feature, which is known as picture-in-picture mode in other browsers, benefits from better discoverability.
Vivaldi is a keyboard-shortcut heavy browser, so improvements made on this front will appeal to a lot of folks
As in Firefox and Chrome, you just click a little button overlaid on a video embed to ‘pop it out’ for playback in an independent, floating, always-on-top window.
“Enabling picture-in-picture is much more straightforward,” Vivaldi explain.
“A single click on a small video box icon displayed in the center of the video will launch it in the same movable, resizable, floating window you know and love.”
Another major uplift concerns keyboard shortcuts. Vivaldi is arguably the most keyboard-shortcut heavy web browser on any platform, so any tweaks made on this front will please a lot of folks.
For Vivaldi 2.11? Well, the team says it’s added “…unique accessibility feature that allows you to focus between different areas of the User Interface and active pages using F6 (or Shift+F6 to reverse).”
This makes navigating web pages using the keyboard so much fast, as this .gif i’ve shamelessly borrowed from the Vivaldi blog demonstrates:
Both the Widevine DRM blob and proprietary media libraries have been updated for Linux, too.
Finally, this update of the browser improves full-screen tab casting (in that it adjusts to fit in the current window). Handy if you wirelessly fling your browser contents to other screens regularly.
Naturally there are a tonne of other, smaller changes besides these which, though might be interesting to read about are vital nonetheless. Vivaldi always put out a detailed changelog for new builds, so do take a look over it if you want to know more.
Vivaldi is free, but not open source software, available to use on Windows, macOS and Linux (there’s even a version of Vivaldi for ARM64 Linux distros too).
Want to install Vivaldi on Ubuntu? It’s easy enough thanks to 32-bit and 64-bit installer packages.