A new version of the highly-configurable, Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser is now available to download.
Vivaldi 7.6’s headline feature is an editable Tab Bar (they capitalise it, not me).
“We’ve made the Tab Bar fully customizable; you pick the tools you want, you decide where to place them. The result is a tab bar that looks and works exactly the way you need it to, making common actions feel obvious,” founder Jon von Tetzchner says.
Right-click on any element in the Tab Bar (the ‘new tab’ button, workspaces, menu, etc) and select ‘Customise Toolbar’ to bring up the new Tab Bar section in the Toolbar Editor. From here, add, remove and move buttons per your own preferences.
Compared to other web browsers, Vivaldi’s tab bar is already pretty minimal (looking at you, Firefox View — which I’ll come back to in a second), so in an inversion of norms, this editor is going to be of more use if you want to ADD items to the tab bar, rather than remove!
Sticking with the tab bar, those who install or upgrade to Vivaldi 7.6 will spot a new ‘Tab Button’ at the end of the tab/title bar.
Clicking on the Tab Button unfurls a list of all open tabs, access recently closed tabs, see duplicate tabs — a pretty sweet feature for tab-hoarders — and quickly close them. You can also use the integrated search bar to find tabs faster.
The features provided are similar to those on the aforementioned Firefox View, but rather than being sequestered in a separate full-page tab, forcing you to shift your context when trying to find/access something, it’s shown on-page.
Other Changes in 7.6
Beyond those changes, Vivaldi 7.6 adds a solid set of other improvements.
Vivaldi’s address bar now supports search keywords. These make it easier to handle certain tasks directly in the address bar. For example, you can type @tabs to search open tabs; @history to search history, and @bookmarks to search bookmarks.
Sleeping tabs wake faster, ad blocking is improved with popup rules (to nix those annoying ads that open in new tabs when you visit some types of sites), users on Windows can make use of trackpad gestures to move back/forward in web pages.
And right-click context menus on webpages see a refresh to, Vivaldi say, “promote the core actions you want to use, so you spend less time scanning and more time doing”.
For more details refer to the announcement on Vivaldi’s blog.
In all, a solid set of refinements to an already solid web browser (and, in contrast to a certain other browser of late, refreshingly free of any shoehorned “AI” gimmicks that feel more like they were added to chase hype than answer a genuine user need).
Get Vivaldi 7.6
Vivaldi is free but not open source software, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Download the latest release from the browser’s official website. A DEB for Ubuntu/Linux Mint users is offered, and this adds the Vivaldi APT repo to provide future updates.
If you’re on Ubuntu, you can install the official Vivaldi snap via App Center or by running sudo snap install vivaldi. Future updates are automatically get installed in the background as/when released.
Prefer Flatpak? A quasi-official build is available on Flathub (quasi as while the Vivaldi Flatpak is packaged and updated by Vivaldi, it is not “officially supported” by Vivaldi as a company yet).