Vivaldi web browser has just released its first major update of the year – a corker it is, too!
Fans of the Chromium-based browser—though Vivaldi Technologies doesn’t appear to be part of the new Linux Foundation-led Supporters of Chromium Browsers project—will discover a bunch of improvements to the Dashboard feature Vivaldi 7.0 delivered.
A new weather widget can be added to see current conditions and hourly and weekly weather forecasts for custom locations, plus the ability to set a preferred temperate, precipitation and wind speed unit (celsius, mm, and mph ftw).
Keeping things scandi-cool, the Norway-based browser makes use of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (met.no) as its weather widget’s meteorological data provider.
Vivaldi Dashboard widgets also gain improved customisation with options to make each individual widget use a solid, semi-transparent, transparent (with blur) or custom colour background (which I’ve done my best to showcase in the screenshot above).
Other Dashboard enhancements:
- Feed widget: option to make first item larger
- Bookmarks widget: improved keyboard navigation
- Agenda widget: show events from past days
- Mail widget: more context menu option
New tab page improvements don’t stop at widgets, either.
New Add Speed Dial-og
Vivaldi 7.1 continues to use a traditional Speed Dial on the new tab page by default (Dashboard is optional) but improves the UX of adding custom websites to Speed Dials.
Click on the ‘new’ button to see the new Add Speed Dial dialog which Vivaldi says is “faster and more intuitive” than previous efforts to do the same thing.
You can continue to add custom sites with custom titles, add custom folders, quickly add links to ‘popular sites’ (as judged by Vivaldi), items in Vivaldi’s ‘travel’ and ‘shopping’ folders, or from frequently visited sites.
Nice changes – just need support for custom icons now!
Search Engine Shakeup
Vivaldi says it has made “a small but important” change to some of its default search engines in an effort to “support the ongoing development of the browser”.
As a result, Bing (previously Vivaldi’s default in the UK), is no longer the default search engine out-of-the-box and Startpage is—its the default for me in the UK at least. Partner search engines generate revenue for Vivaldi so may differ based on location.
Changing the search engine in Vivaldi is easy, should you wish to revert back to Bing (or whatever was default in your location). You can continue to set separate search providers for regular windows and private windows, specify a specific image search engine.
The company also notes it “made changes to ensure that ad attribution works correctly […] for us to be paid by our partners” but stresses that it does not track, profile, or sell data about browser users.
Beyond
Other changes in Vivaldi 7.1 include:
- Share open tabs to other devices with Vivaldi installed (e.g., mobile)
- Option to import open tabs from other browsers during onboarding
- Session-induced crash loop banished for good
- Device name can be edited in sync settings without logging out
- Option to automatically make a unique filename from “Save as”
- Average download speed now shown in download panel
- Delta updates on macOS
- Mail, Calendar and Feeds fixes
- Linux fix for locales with 24-hour clocks or without seconds in long date formats
- Proprietary codecs use version 118356 for new Linux installs
More details on the changes above can be gleaned by reading the Vivaldi 7.1 blog announcement or sifting through the bug reports on the Vivaldi discussion boards.
Install Vivaldi 7.1 on Ubuntu
It’s easy to install Vivaldi on Ubuntu as Vivaldi is available on the Snap Store.
You can open Ubuntu Software/App Center to seek it out or run sudo snap install vivaldi from a Terminal. As a Snap, future updates to Vivaldi will be downloaded and applied in the background.
Vivaldi DEB packages for 64-bit Intel/AMD and ARM are available from the Vivaldi website. The DEBs work on all modern Ubuntu-based Linux distributions and add the official Vivaldi APT repo so that future updates to the browser arrive alongside other updates.
Finally, there’s a a quasi-official1 Vivaldi Flatpak on Flathub.
If you already have Vivaldi installed from one of those options this update will be rolling out to you from today. Pop open your preferred GUI package manager to upgrade or fetch through the terminal using with an apt update, flatpak update or sudo snap refresh.
In all, another solid update to this free (but not open source) web browser.
- Packaged and updated by Vivaldi engineers but not officially supported, hence unverified. ↩︎