Mastodon is now baked into the latest builds of the Vivaldi web browser.
Folks are flocking to this federated social networking service in droves of late, a trend Vivaldi is well aware of. Such keen supporters of decentralised social media, they even launched their own Mastodon instance “Vivaldi Social” a few weeks back.
Now they’re taking things a step further and integrating Mastodon inside of the browser itself!
Don’t panic if you don’t like the sound of this: it’s a discrete implementation that is easy to ignore or not use. Like Vivaldi’s other bells and whistles — spanning everything from arcade games to e-mail client to note taking tool — users won’t notice this feature is there unless they want to use it.
To access it, open the panel in Vivaldi, click the ‘Mastodon’ logo in the sidebar, and go from there. The web app doesn’t run in the background, only when the panel is open and in view – so no: this doesn’t chew through system resources or valuable bandwidth unless you actively use it.
Mastodon isn’t the only new feature — though you do follow omg! ubuntu on Mastodon, right? 😉
Elsewhere, Vivaldi 5.6 lets you pin tab stacks, and intros support for the privacy-minded You.com search engine (albeit only in select countries, no list of which was available at the time of writing).
Keen to kick the tyres on all of that? You can download Vivaldi for Windows, macOS, and Linux from the browser’s official website. Linux builds are provided as .deb installers for Ubuntu (which auto-add the Vivaldi repo so you get future updates). Notably, Vivaldi is also available for Linux on ARM – which is cool!