A new version of the Vivaldi web browser is available to download, carrying changes said to make our collective “everyday browsing smoother, faster, and just a little more delightful.”
How does Vivaldi 7.4 make browsing the increasingly gamified, algorithmically manipulative and AI slopified modern web more ‘delightful’?
Shortcuts.
More specifically, Vivaldi 7.4 gives you the ability to “fine-tune” how shortcuts behave on a per-site basis. If you want a website’s shortcuts to take priority over Vivaldi’s, you can.
“It’s about putting you in control, making sure your shortcuts work where and when you need them most”, says Jon von Tetzchner, Vivaldi CEO.
To take advantage of these new controls head to Settings → Privacy and Security → Website Permissions and then add (or find) the websites you wish to allow “prioritised keyboard shortcuts” for.
Fine-grained shortcut controls? Not a feature most people will use (or switch bowser to take advantage of), is it? But that is the USP of Vivaldi: catering as much to myriad niche needs other browsers ignore as it does to the key mainstream must-haves.
Talking of, the launching Vivaldi is said to be faster and less cluttered in this release, thanks to a “simplified profile picker” (which visually resemble the new profile switcher in Firefox 138). The Windows and the History panels were also made “more intuitive”.
Elsewhere, Vivaldi 7.4 sees continued work to improve its Address Bar, with Tetzchner billing it as being “smarter, faster, and more consistent” in this release.
From Settings → Address Bar you can decide which items are shown in the dropdown menu, including a new Search History option, and increase the number of items shown up to magic number of—cultural meme klaxon—421.
A few cherry-picked changes of note:
- New Copy Video Frame & Save Video Frame As menu items
- Support for importing Firefox tabs
- Dashboard Currency widget refreshes data more frequently
- Dashboard Weather widget fixes interval and location change issues
- Setting re-added to remember start page group
- Zoom slider now adheres to set theme
- Assorted fixes for Mail, Calendar & Feeds
- Chromium updated to v136.0.7103.138
To expand on the update to Chromium v136: the look of scrollbars in Vivaldi has changed because of this. Both overlay and non-overlay scrollbars are now more rounded on Windows and Linux to “fit the Windows 11 Fluent design language”.
Why are Windows design patterns being followed on Linux?
To quote the upstream Google release notes: “This change applies to Linux as well because Chromium’s Linux scrollbar design has historically been aligned with what ships on Windows.”
Get Vivaldi 7.4
Existing Vivaldi user can upgrade to Vivaldi 7.4 update the same way they did previous updates: in-app (Windows, macOS) or software package methods (e.g., snap, Flathub, apt, etc).
Those who want to install Vivaldi for the first time can get installer packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux (including ARM64) from the browser’s official website (a DEB for Ubuntu/Linux Mint users is offered, which adds the Vivaldi APT repo too).
Ubuntu users can install the official Vivaldi snap app via the App Center (or run sudo snap install vivaldi from the command-line). Future updates are automatically installed in the background as/when released.
Finally, a quasi-official build is available on Flathub, if you prefer that packaging method – quasi-official since the Flatpak version is packaged and maintained a Vivaldi engineer, but it is “officially supported” by Vivaldi as a company (yet).
- I never read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so the whole “42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything” thing being funny is something I don’t get. ↩︎