Vivaldi 1.8: better audio management, drag and drop notes
Vivaldi Technologies AS released the first development version of Vivaldi 1.8 on Tuesday featuring better audio management and drag & drop note taking support.
The Norwegian company released Vivaldi 1.7 last week, and has been busy since fixing bugs and adding new features to the next upcoming version of the web browser.
If you are on the development channel you may have received the update to the new version already. If you have not, you may select Vivaldi > Help > Check for Updates to run a manual check.
The new version comes with a surprising number of new features. Surprising, because the last stable release happened just a week ago.
Audio management
I start with the feature that I like the most. Vivaldi has great audio management capabilities already that let you mute sound in the browser with the keyboard or mouse easily.
The new feature improves that functionality further. It enables you to set audio playing preferences.
- Load vivaldi://settings/tabs/ in the browser's address bar to get started.
- Scroll down until you come to the Tab Muting section.
There you find three options. The first, play all audio, is exactly how all modern web browsers handle audio. If a site or service wants to play audio, it is allowed regardless of whether that is in the active tab, or the background.
The two other options change that. The first, Play Only in Active Tab, blocks all background sounds in the browser. This is the case even if there is no sound in the active tab.
The other option, Prioritize Active Tab, handles that better if you like to play audio in background tabs at times. If there is no audio playing in the active tab, a background tab is allowed to play audio. If sound starts to play in the active tab, all background tabs are muted automatically.
The feature automates audio management in Vivaldi. Instead of having to mute tabs regularly or occasionally using keyboard or mouse, you may now select one of the automated options when it comes to audio playback in the web browser.
Notes via drag and drop
Vivaldi supported note taking for some time, and has improved the feature recently in regards to screenshot taking.
The new update lets you drag and drop text to the notes sidebar to add it as a new note directly. This may be faster than having to copy and paste the information to the notes area using mouse and/or keyboard.
So, if you use the note taking feature already, you may find the new addition useful as it may speed things up for you.
Other changes
The developers changed a couple of other things in the new development release of Vivaldi 1.8 on top of that.
It is now possible to sort the browsing history in the History Panel. Simply click on the "sort by date" menu at the top, and select one of the other sort options (title, address, page views).
The right-click context menu of links has a new open link option which -- duh -- opens the link in the same tab.
The last change lets you set the Vivaldi Start Page as the default homepage.
Closing Words
The features sound really promising, especially the audio management one.
Now You: Do you find the features useful?
Focus a little on performance and stability next please Vivaldi.
Bookmarks can and do perform terribly on modern hardware if you have lots of them. Address bar autocompletion etc. performance with lots of bookmarks and tabs is terrible. There are clear bugs with at least some hardware when resizing the window or full screening html video for example, shouldn’t take second(s). In general there are usability issues that IMO would deserve a look at this point of development.
Vivaldi is beginning to look good.
Question: Is Vivaldi using Google Chrome?
Vivaldi is based off of Chromium and uses the Google Chrome Store for extensions, themes, etc.. Chromium is essentially the bare “guts” of Chrome, before Google starts adding their own features to it.
I have just updated and tried Vivaldi again. Now that’s starting to be interesting. I can see they are trying to add something.
However it’s not ready yet. Interface is suprisingly slow in some places. Selecting a bookmark in the bookmark manager will open it instead of selecting it for edition.
Coming back to Firefox I thought I was opening a kid product. I has forgotten how a professional interface looked like.
If you unmark the option “Open Bookmark Panel Items with Single Click” in Settings, you can select bookmarks for edition.
Thanks. Helpful. I do think it’s a bug, though (error in design, if one prefers).
I much prefer the Firefox interface to the Vivaldi one.
Honestly, trying out the latest Brave build has led me to be more excited for the near-term future of Brave than Vivaldi. Brave has a much “cleaner” look to it, and I like that the Brave development team seems focused on things like performance, security, privacy, etc. whereas Vivaldi’s team is adding niche things like Phillips Hue support, while the browser’s performance is still lacking.
Hello Martin,
As far as I can see this has been released 3 days ago and not today.
You are right, will correct asap.