Vivaldi 1.6 gets Title Tab Notifications
Vivaldi is working on version 1.6 of the web browser currently and pushing out updates to the developer channel regularly that introduce new features.
You have probably come across sites in the past that use the page title to indicate that updates are available.
This is mostly done by social sites such as Twitter or Facebook to indicate new posts or messages.
While you may find these hints useful as they notify you when something happens on a social media site, you may have noticed as well that they may impact the page title negatively.
The main issue here comes into play if you have so many tabs open in the browser that these notifications that the title is not shown anymore at all. This is a Chromium issue for the most part as the browser has no option to limit the minimum tab width and enable tab bar scrolling.
Title Tab Notifications
The most recent build of Vivaldi, Vivaldi 1.6.687.3, addresses this by detecting these numbers and adding them to the favicon.
Today's build attempts to address these issues. We detect the numbers enclosed and highlight it above the favicon. The look of this notification also conforms to the theme you use, adjusting its color and roundness accordingly.
The counter goes up to 9 and then displays as a "+". This is a space saving mechanism within the favicon area as large numbers become unreadable or obscure too much of the favicon. However, no information is lost, even with small tabs you can read the full number by hovering the tab to see the full page title.
The number goes up to 9 and is replaced by a plus icon if it goes up any higher than that. You may hover the mouse cursor on the icon to get the full number at any time, but that is probably not something that most users are interested in as it should make little difference if 15 or 43 updates are available.
The new version of Vivaldi ships with another handy feature. It enables you to quickly go up a directory by holding down Ctrl before clicking on the URL of the site in the browser's address bar.
Vivaldi notes that this is a work in progress and may not yet work on all sites you encounter. A quick test on Ghacks was successful and I can see this become useful in certain situations.
Development versions of Vivaldi should pick up the update automatically. You can run a manual check for updates with a click on Help > Check for Updates.
You may also download the latest version of the browser from the official website. There you find the full changelog as well.
Now You: What's your take on the direction that Vivaldi is heading towards?
It would be nice to actually get a NEW browser but i see this is a chrome clone..i see no point in using this over chrome..if it uses chrome extensions then it connects to google servers.
in my mind there is nothing original or new here…
The wait for an ORIGINAL browser continues.
I tested it out, loved it, but takes up a lot of RAM. On the test machine which has only 4 GB of RAM, it was using 4.8, with 6 tabs. :-(
Vivaldi uses the same independent process per tab/extension architecture as Chrome, so yes, it does cause it to become a memory hog quickly.
WTH I read it is not open source?! No point bothering with this…
weird why don’t they have a portable version for people to try?
It was (now) pointed out that you can do so during installation. Look above.
I wanted to try this browser a couple of days ago, but could not find a portable version to download.
Download the official installer, open it and click the “Advanced” button in order to change the installation type to “Standalone”.
They should have been spending more time working on this and streamlining performance (I still find Vivaldi’s performance to be quite uneven), rather than using resources to build in Phillips Hue support. That feature is so amazingly niche, I can’t believe they bothered with it.
This is awesome. Hopefully they implement it for the panel tabs as well.