Vivaldi 3.1 out with customizable menus and Notes Manager
Vivaldi Technologies has released a new stable desktop version of the company's Vivaldi web browser. Vivaldi 3.1 comes with customizable menus and a full-page Notes Manager.
Existing users will be updated to the new version automatically; it is possible to speed up the process by selecting Vivaldi Menu > Help > Check for Updates. Vivaldi checks if a new version is available to download and install it if it is.
Vivaldi 3.1 can also be downloaded from the official Vivaldi website for all supported desktop operating systems.
Vivaldi 3.1
First thing that existing users of Vivaldi may notice is that the browser's startup performance has improved. The browser's tab handling performance has been improved in the new version as well according to the release notes.
Tip: check out our how to speed up the Vivaldi browser guide for additional tips on making Vivaldi feel snappier.
One of the main new features of Vivaldi 3.1 introduces support for customizing menus. We reviewed the feature already in our preview of Vivaldi 3.1 and suggest you check out the article for additional details.
Select Vivaldi Menu > Tools > Settings > Appearance or use the shortcut Ctrl-F12 to open the Settings and select Appearance then when the window opens.
Scroll down until you find the new Menu Customization option on the page. You may add, remove, or move menu items from the main menu bar currently (means context menu editing is not yet supported).
You can create root folders or delete entire folders; if you never use the Edit menu for instance, you could right-click on Edit in the menu customization options and select delete to remove it.
Similarly, you may create new root folders and add commands to them. Apart from selecting commands that are already available in menus, it is possible to select new commands.
Last but not least, it is also possible to add commands directly to the menu. These are then accessible just like buttons when selected.
Full-page Notes Manager
The built-in Notes Manager of the Vivaldi browser has been improved in this release. Previously, it sat in the sidebar and allowed you to jot down notes quickly or add web content to notes.
The new Notes Manager can be accessed from the Start Page or by right-clicking on a note and selecting the "open in note editor" option of the context menu.
The interface is divided into two panes: the list of notes at the top and the editor below that.
The editor works similarly to other rich text editors. You may use formatting options to format text, e.g. create headlines, lists or make text bold, and add attachments to a note.
Other editing features include undo-redo functionality, the ability to find text, and to get the word count of a note.
Vivaldi may sync notes content across all devices if sync is enabled.
Closing Words
Vivaldi Technologies continues to improve the customization options of the Vivaldi browser and its integrated features. The ability to customize menus is a good next step as it provides users with options to add or remove menu items from the main menu. It would be great if Vivaldi would extend this to the context menus as well.
The full-page Notes Editor makes note editing easier as you don't have to cope with the tiny sidebar interface anymore when editing notes.
Now You: What is your take on these changes?
Hi all ….
I just got the update, I like it, especially the customize menu feature, if you use the window for multiple pages, it simplifies the creation of a tab stack, and the display of tiled windows. In my case I added those options to “view” which I thought was the most logical place to put them.
Its done properly in my opinion, unlike the numerous add-ons which invoke multiple instances of the browser to achieve the same result. This is a waste of resources, and CPU cycles.
I’ve yet to explore all the other options, but this solution to tiled pages really pleased me, I wonder what else they have in store for us, in reference to user customization ? I read above, customizable context menus, I’m not quite sure how useful that will be for me, but we’ll see.
Peter Newton [London UK]
And you can finally move the tool icons on the toolbar with a simple drag & drop (as in other browsers) or do you still have to combine mouse + shift on your keyboard? :D
What they first need to do is to fix the terrible old looking ui. It looks so pedantic. Small buttons, bad themes, even bad place to put the menu on left of tab bar. Whenever someone asks about fixing ui in forums, they say you can customize it. From which angle do they think one will be willing to waste hours to fix the css.
Nice one :)
https://i.postimg.cc/2yzY17xS/Untitled.png
The biggest change for me would be
– Add support for WebRTC blocking (VB-68017)
mentioned in the changelog. Sadly as per the comments on Vivaldi’s website it’s not true, this only stops IP leaks.
WebRTC is needed for cancerous WebTorrents to function and only Firefox has the ability to block that.
In countries like Germany using a chromium browser (without blocking WebRTC) is like playing the Russian roulette. A website may be using torrents to display media and you can not know it does that and be breaking the law without being aware this happens.
Can you please link some reading material regarding this? From what I know the torrent technology perse is not illegal in Germany. Thanks.
P.s. I’m German.
@Iron Heart
thank you very much, I’ll have to test that add-on.
@Matt
The issue with webtorrent is that you don’t know it’s active and you may end up distributing protected content without being aware you’re doing that, and distribution carries a heavier penalty than just downloading.
For example someone at your company can go to a website like bitchute and suddenly he’s distributing copyrighted materials to god knows how many people and the company is liable for his behaviour.
This is why my workplace has banned all chromium browsers.
@helix5837532
You can test here whether or not the extension works (don’t forget to disable all WebRTC features in the settings of the extension before, and use non-proxied UDP):
https://browserleaks.com/webrtc
With the extension, the website shows no WebRTC support whatsoever for me in Brave (should also go for all other Chromium-based browsers).
@helix5837532
uBlock Origin has an option in its settings for preventing WebRTC leak. uBlock Origin can do that in all Chromium-based browsers, one doesn’t need Vivaldi in particular for that capability.
You can also enable the following flag, just to be on the safe side: #enable-webrtc-hide-local-ips-with-mdns
Preventing WebRTC leak doesn’t have anything to do with disabling it completely. No chromium browser can do that.
@helix5837532
EDIT: Sorry, I just saw that you need to disable WebRTC completely for reasons other than privacy. This is possible in Chromium, contrary to popular belief.
You need this extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webrtc-control/fjkmabmdepjfammlpliljpnbhleegehm
As per its description, it can disable the following components of WebRTC:
– navigator.getUserMedia
– window.MediaStreamTrack
– window.RTCPeerConnection
– window.RTCSessionDescription
Which, incidentally, are what WebRTC consists of:
– https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/
In case you opt for the extension, don’t forget to allow it in private windows, as well.
Admittedly, it is more cumbersome to get rid of it in Chromium. In Firefox, it is sufficient to set the about:config entry “media.peerconnection.enabled” to “false”. There are also browsers like Pale Moon that specifically do not support WebRTC in the first place.
Hope that this is helpful to you.
First time I’ve seen Pale Moon mentioned in a bit on Ghacks. I’m worried right now about the future of WebComponents and YouTube on that browser.
Look how “helpful” Matty Tobin and Sajadi were to this poor fellow asking the same question (tsk tsk)
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24573
@jody thornton.
I am struggling with youtube on pale moon at the minute as it keeps fluctuating between the old and new layout.I prefer the old layout but it will only be a matter of time before google pulls the plug on that.
I think the palemoon developers are trying to implement some form of web components to make youtube better but i am finding youtube works better on firefox these days.
I love the full themes pale moon offers and it is a swift browser in most areas but facebook and youtube bring it to it’s knees.
@Iron Heart and @Kubrick – agree with all of your points:
I’m trying out Waterfox Current right now, and it does seem more workable at this juncture. I’ll leave Pale Moon installed just to see how WebComponents works out. Waterfox Current may just shift to ESR 78 in July, and if I hate it, I may want to stay with the Moon team, only if they can remedy Facebook and YouTube issues.
Um maybe I don’t want to stay with Moon-Matt now – it appears the Pale Moon environment is lacking in tolerance in more ways than one:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=24592
(tsk tsk)
@Jody Thornton
Well, it was only a question of time. They were bound to encounter a problem that is hard to overcome at some point. There is a reason why the development teams at Google, Mozilla, or Apple are as big as they are, some projects require significant manpower. Moonchild Productions lacks the financial resources to hire anyone, all developers currently involved are working on Pale Moon without (regular) financial compensation.
Unless they were to suddenly receive substantial funding from an outside party, I think the project is moribund. Moonchild’s refusal to follow current Firefox releases and / or to adopt current Mozilla technologies is further complicating matters, if his browser would somewhat regularly follow Firefox, adopting features like this would be far easier, since backporting would be less problematic or even trivial.
I think the Pale Moon team could contribute to the “greater good” in several ways other ways, for example, they could take whatever Firefox ESR release is current at the time and strip it from all spyware components and bloat, an “Unmozillaed Firefox”, so to speak. I am sure such a browser, which could run current Firefox extensions, would be much appreciated and sought after. And I am sure Moonchild would do a better job than, say, Alex Kontos, who doesn’t strip much if any telemetry code, instead just deactivating it. An actual “clean Firefox” would gain Moonchild lots(!) of users.
But what are they doing instead? They are trying to maintain an old codebase, while not having any kind of noteworthy extension support that would make others use the browser. I think that’s truly a shame, they could do much better than this.
As for that Sajadi post – Yeah, what can you say? The average user is both unwilling and unable to code, many people are working in other jobs or are even unable to attain the required skills in the first place. When these people encounter a problem and report it, there is no good in asking them to suddenly start coding. And this is somewhat reflected in the “results” Sajadi has achieved… I mean, did anyone start to code for the project because Sajadi asked them to? After all, not even Sajadi himself is among the contributors of Pale Moon – which is ironic, the time he invested in telling others to start coding could have went into learning to code himself. Never mind – the logical thing for them to do to would be to ask people for help who have actual coding skills, but those people are to be found in other places.
As for myself, I have settled for Ungoogled Chromium and Brave (projects which will never encounter the same issues as Pale Moon, since they stay close to the project they originate from). This way, I avoid feeding the data kraken (Google), or the company funded by that same data kraken (Mozilla). Feels good to “cuck” Google, I am using their technology, while avoiding the spyware they continuously try to force-feed me.
@Iron heart.
i will disagree with afew points you hae raised in regard to pale moon.
Financial bounties have been offered to coders to help with palemoon but there was no significant response,The financial incentive was there but unfortunately nobody took up the offers.
The entire palemoon ideology is based on NOT following firefox and some users do not want to use firefox or dislike the direction they are going so palemoon is a viable option for people who wish to use the old firefox looking browser.
Ungoogled chromium.?
how is that different from srware iron.?
By using something like iron which incidentally the same level of privacy can be achieved in chromium by just flicking a few settings off you are in fact insecure.Iron blocks “everything” but that is it’s issue as certificate revocation lists will not be updated etc.
Just out of curiousity what code is being stripped out of ungoogled chromium that cannot be done with other chromium based browsers.?
@Kubrick
> Financial bounties have been offered to coders to help with palemoon but there was no significant response,The financial incentive was there but unfortunately nobody took up the offers.
I was not talking about a small bounty offered for solving complex problems (no wonder nobody jumped on that), I was talking about formally employed developers working for them on a daily basis, who would be obliged to solve issues.
> The entire palemoon ideology is based on NOT following firefox
Sure, but this is guaranteed to stay niche then, especially when they don’t offer compatibility with current Firefox extensions. Extension support makes or breaks browsers! The only way for Pale Moon to have significant extension support is to follow Firefox, but seeing the sheer amount of bloatware and spyware in FF, I am sure a trimmed down Firefox would be welcomed by many.
Old-looking Firefox with very few actively developed extensions is a Ungoogled chromium.? how is that different from srware iron.?
Ungoogled Chromium differs from SRWare Iron in that it is not a massive fraud:
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/iron.html
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ungoogled_chromium.html
> By using something like iron which incidentally the same level of privacy can be achieved in chromium by just flicking a few settings off
Flipping some setting switches ≠stripping out code or binaries.
> Just out of curiousity what code is being stripped out of ungoogled chromium that cannot be done with other chromium based browsers.?
It’s not a case of others being unable to do the same as Ungoogled Chromium, it’s rather a case of others just replacing Google’s spyware with their own (Edge, Opera, SRWare Iron).
As for the things Ungoogled Chromium stripped out:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature-overview
https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset/blob/master/README.md
Here is the equivalent overview for Brave:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)
*Old-looking Firefox with very few actively developed extensions is a <1% market share niche.
Sorry, accidentally deleted that part.
@iron heart.
on my puplinux pale moon is still the most aesthetically pleasing browser i have and it blends in with the jwm themes a real treat.
Now upon my initial view of vivaldi i have discovered vivaldi is nowhere near as customisable as pale moon and this is a fact.
The vivaldi UUID concern has got the better of me and i removed vivaldi forthwith bearing in mind i had conducted substantial research on this UUID and the vivaldi forum was not very forthcoming.
32bit linux pale moon will cease end of november of this year and so i may stick with firefox after that.
@Kubrick
Pale Moon is that customizable because the browser can run extensions that can do almost anything within it.
Firefox is not much more customizable than Vivaldi when it comes to the UI, both just utilize CSS code at this point, extensions can only achieve very limited UI customization in both cases.
The UUID, according to the Vivaldi developers, is only there for counting the absolute number of active users, that’s why the browser pings only once per day, and that’s why the amount of data transmitted is negligible. If it were really collecting anything you do, you’d see more pings and a higher amount of data transmitted. Firefox does that, too, by the way, and additionally collects a great many other things.
Use what suits you best.
@Iron Heart
thank you very much, I’ll have to test that add-on.
@Matt
The issue with webtorrent is that you don’t know it’s active and you may end up distributing protected content without being aware you’re doing that, and distribution carries a heavier penalty than just downloading.
For example someone at your company can go to a website like bitchute and suddenly he’s distributing copyrighted materials to god knows how many people and the company is liable for his behaviour.
This is why my workplace has banned all chromium browsers.
@helix5837532
Uhm, yes, I know that already. But disabling the IP leak removes the privacy threat posed by WebRTC. What good reason would you have for disabling WebRTC completely? Reducing your attack surface? If security issues of WebRTC are found, they are being patched just like any other security issue.
Waiting for right-click context menu customization
Nice browser,I have been using vivaldi for just over a week.
I am not seeing the speed issues which others mention and it runs nice and fast here on puppy linux 32bit.The speed is quite adequate.
The notes function is something i will hardly use but it is nice it is there if i do wish to use it.
My only concern if you like is the fact it is closed source as i usually go for open source browsers but vivaldi runs so good on my old laptop that i am willing to make an exception to the rule.
I did have earlier quips with vivaldi but to tell the truth this browser is getting better with time.
All in all a good experience and the vivaldi folks are very friendly and helpful.
It’s not closed source, it’s source available. You can’t just steal the code and use it on your own browser, but you can freely view it.
@helix5837532.
That is not entirely correct.
The source may be avilable to view but it has proprietary licenses so it is indeed not a FOSS browser by any means.
It also has a EULA which is a clear indication it is a proprietary browser and the vivaldi wikipage even states this.
But i am not complaining and as you said before they are protecting their code.
The unique user id is not doing them any favours either .I know this is just for user figures but the tinfoil hat crowd will see it differently.
Customizable menus! Nice!
I recently finished customizing all Firefox menus via userChrome.css. It was quite a bit of work, but I was able to customize everything exactly how I wanted (including changing the strings for some menuitems).
This looks much less time-consuming, although much less flexible.
Overall, I think it’s a great start.
Vivaldi is really shaping up to be the second most customizable browser available. Obviously, Firefox is first because of userContent.css and userChrome.css, but Vivaldi is making a good showing.
All the other web browsers are inflexible and can’t be customized. They really don’t interest me due to their rigidity.
Yet another useless feature for Vivaldi, when accessing Downloads has remained the same user-unfriendly method for 5 years already.
Downloads are only accessible in the sidebar or using CTRL+J, to access the sidebar easily, you have to have the status bar enabled, which has a toggle button for the sidebar. If you don’t want to have the status bar, your options are either using CTRL+J, or pressing F4 to toggle the sidebar and it doesn’t even open on the Downloads tab either.
That’s a problem when you’re downloading a new file and want to access it immediately, in contrast, Chrome, Opera, Firefox and others have created a pop-up system for new downloads so you can access them easily and immediately.
Not with Vivaldi though. It’s ironic how much customization they give you and aim the browser at power users, which translates as them trying to make the browser more usable for everyone through customization and yet a feature as basic as accessing Downloads remains ignored for 5 years already.
Not to mention how slowly this browser loads thanks to its custom UI. Every other Chromium browser when launched, immediately shows the UI and the rest of the browser, with Vivaldi, first you have to stare at a full-screen Vivaldi logo for a second before the UI loads, it’s really annoying how they are handling their browser.
I had hopes about it since they wanted to create a new Opera, but the old Opera version 12 and older was a lot more usable and intuitive, Vivaldi is just random useless features for the sake of having random useless features, because why the F*** not?
Just enable the status bar, then. What’s your problem with that ? Are you a status bar-o-phobe, or what ? It just occupies a few pixels. On top of that, the download panel on the left keeps all the download locations for ever, so what’s missing exactly ?
As for the “V” screen on launch, this is nit-picking on a high level. If a program suits you, and it needs one second to launch, are you going to choose another program, not suited to you ?
I hate bars
@swat.
The vivaldi status bar can be turned off so i don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Individual icons on the statusbar can be removed if you so wish.
I have a relatively low powered 32bit computer and vivaldi is launched and ready to go in 3 seconds flat and there is a noticeable difference in browsing speed compared to firefox.
Mozilla have broken firefox in some way so i had to say bye bye and replaced it with vivaldi.
As i said before my only concern with vivaldi is the UUID but other than that it runs just fine on this old computer.
You can just enable a switch which will show the sidebar on click. It takes 2 pixels when collapsed. Showing downloads in the sidebar is much better than hiding them under an icon like Firefox does.