Vivaldi 3.3 browser with new Break mode released
Vivaldi Technologies released Vivaldi 3.3, a new stable version of the company's desktop web browser, for all supported platforms on Monday.
The new version of Vivaldi browser is already available via the browser's automatic update system and also as a direct download on the Vivaldi website.
Vivaldi users may select Menu > Help > Check for Updates to run a manual check for updates. The browser will pick up the new version and install it on the device.
Vivaldi 3.3
The big new feature of Vivaldi 3.3 is a Break mode that is designed to provide users with options to take breaks while working in the browser.
Once activated, break mode "mutes and stops HTML5 audio and videos, hides all tabs, panels, and other content leaving the screen clean".
Just click on the new break mode icon on the left side of the browser's status bar, or use the designated keyboard shortcut Ctrl+, to toggle it.
The main idea behind break mode is to power down the browser for the time being; ideal for taking a break without browsing Internet sites or watching videos, or chatting with others without any distractions on the screen.
Break mode offers another interesting option. Remember boss key applications that hide program windows on the desktop when activated? Since Break mode hides everything that is happening in the browser, it can be used for a similar purpose. Not necessarily to hide activity from your superior, but ideal when someone else approaches you or is about to walk by you.
Last but not least, Vivaldi notes that Break mode may reduce the browser's resource usage so that other programs may use the freed-up resources.
Vivaldi 3.3 comes with a number of additional new features and changes. If you use the browser's private browsing mode, you will notice that it features a new theme
The new theme uses a blue and purple color scheme to distinguish private browsing mode better from regular browsing mode.
Vivaldi developers added options to set a custom private browsing theme in the Settings under Themes > Private Window Theme. Just head over there and pick any of the available themes for that. Vivaldi supports creating new themes directly in the browser, and these themes will also become available for selection.
Another new feature highlights the base part of the Internet domain in the browser's address bar. If you read an article here on Ghacks in Vivaldi, you will notice that ghacks.net is highlighted in bold while the remaining parts of the URL are less visible (but still displayed in full).
You will be drawn towards the core part of the URL while the rest of the URL will be visible and lowlighted. This way you can recognize which company controls the domain and prevent scams and phishing attacks.
The browser displays a warning icon if the address bar is very narrow so that the base domain is difficult to read.
The new Vivaldi version supports another new feature that has been added to the browser's address bar. The different parts of the URL can now be highlighted easily using the Ctrl-key (Command-key on Mac).
Vivaldi highlights the parts of the URL that will be selected when you hold down the key on the keyboard. You may use it to go up directories quickly.
Vivaldi highlights two additional improvements on the official company blog: users may drag & drop Speed Dials to folders on the desktop, and the browser supports full-page blocking with options to set custom rules.
Now You: Have you tried Vivaldi 3.3?
Maybe they should concentrate on fixing bugs instead of implenting new features.
I tried to give Vivaldi on PC another shot. Used it for about 3 days, then my patience ran completely dry and I gave up on it once again. There are so many little bugs with this browser that pretty much every other Chromium-based browser just doesn’t have. Like popular websites like Discord not working properly, for example in the top left where I can access the list of my friends, only 1/4 of the button is clickable on Vivaldi, not a problem on any other browser I’ve ever used. It took me a while to figure out why I was trying to click the button and it only worked in the lower right corner…
This combined with other little annoyances in Vivaldi was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I just uninstalled it once again. I just don’t see what they’re trying to do with this browser anymore. It was never as fast as Chrome, websites load slower, some feel more broken, the browser itself loads slower, in Chrome when you fire up the browser, you immediately see the content of tabs and them loading, in Vivaldi you first see a screen with the logo for a second and then you see tab content loading, it’s just a few more seconds being wasted on absolutely nothing justifiable.
The worst of all is they keep bloating their browser with this plethora of useless, dumb features such as this “Break Mode”, which I read 3 different articles about it and I still am not 100% how it works, probably because it’s THAT dumb of a feature in the first place.
The only saving grace would be if they implement extension support on their Android version, then it will be worth using. I even tried to use the built-in Ad-Blocker to load custom filter lists to maximize the blocking and guess what? The lists make the browser painfully slow, like it’s just annoying to watch it struggle with loading websites, in comparison Kiwi with all the filters enabled on Nano Adblocker + Nano Defender + Privacy Badger + AutoplayStopper works just as fast as if it had zero extensions. That just goes to show what kind of piss poor job the Vivaldi team is doing with their browser(s). At this point I’m convinced that they like to exist in their small, gated community where the only members are their fanboys who keep praising them for everything they do and they never have the heart to complain about bugs or missing features and the Vivaldi team live in illusion that their browser is perfectly fine and definitely on the right track, when it’s not.
@Allwynd
Brave is the best Chromium-based browser. Same performance, but better privacy than Chrome and Chromium. Ungoogled Chromium is OK if you can be bothered to keep up with browser updates and extension updates manually. On mobile, I’d put Bromite and Kiwi ahead of Brave, until the Brave devs introduce extension support at least. As always all IMHO, of course.
That not so brave piece of software is having forced updates which cannot be disabled and push the new code for their gimmicky coins or rewards to support with ads their financial backers.
@Not_brave
1) No major browser these days has an option to turn off updates permanently. That is unfortunate, but doesn’t disqualify any specific browser, because of the overall situation. If you dislike automatic updates, create the related enterprise policy or block the domain from which the update is fetched in your router. It’s not hard to do.
2) Brave Rewards are turned off by default, you are making a problem out of something which the user has to consciously enable himself / herself. But even then, when it is enabled, it is not a privacy threat. I am not going to spoon feed you regarding the way Brave Rewards are implemented. Enough articles describing it out there – suffice to say that Brae Rewards aren’t a privacy issue and were specifically designed(!) not to be one.
Also, if you take offense with Brave for reasons (real or imagined), you are free not to use it in any case.
*Brave Rewards
@Iron Heart
Huh?
It’s easy to disable updates with no notifications in Firefox and every Chromium version I’ve used.
Of course a lengthy treatise can be written on “The Meaning of Disable.”
@ULBoom
I don’t know what you mean. Firefox doesn’t have a visible setting in its UI anymore to disable updates. You can choose to either let FF install the updates automatically, or to download them anyway and nag you about them, until you consent. It used to have a third option “Never check for updates” which was removed in FF 63.0 two years ago. FF not downloading the updates at all / no nags can only be achieved via enterprise policy, or by blocking the domain from where it fetches the update on the network level.
I know that Ungoogled Chromium doesn’t have an updater at all, but his is not really a choice, is it? The other Chromium-based browsers that I am aware off have no setting to completely disable updates (again: without enterprise policy or global domain blocking). Correct me if I am wrong, I don’t know every single Chromium-based browser first hand.
Vivaldi, the real successor of Opera browser, Chromium based, it is well known, the most actively developed, the most feature rich, with very receptive devs. to users voice. Oh, and yes, it is respecting them by having the setting to disable forced updates, Windows and Mac.
Any software with forced updates it has shady code behind it.
@Not_brave_only_shady
Well, going by this definition a great number of software that is legitimate would be “shady”. The reason why Brave and others force automatic updates is security, browser updates usually also contain security fixes. Those who know what they are doing have other means to stop the update, but this option being available to the “Uh oh an annoying update again, let’s turn it off completely!” normies lowers their security. So while in general I am supportive of options being available to the user, I can at least see the reason why Brave and others don’t include such a setting – and that reason is not “shadiness”.
None of Brave’s updates, for as long as I used it, had an anti-user impact, don’t make such assumptions please, without knowing the content of the updates. Sweeping generalizations are not helpful in most cases.
Again, nobody forces you (or anyone else, for that matter) to use Brave, if you prefer Vivaldi, then that’s fine and a legitimate opinion!
chrome doesnt use magic to load stuff “faster”. Its often just cheap tricks, you could also call it cheating to get false merits. eg. it loady stuff ahead in the background, or preloads stuff that the user ‘may’ click to see – whats not alwas agood thing security wise, esp not if you want to keep your profile low as user. i rather have my websites appear some seconds later rendered, but instead have influence on what the browser is actually doing. Actually that superficial view of users is exactly what turns the internet into a monoculture dominated by a small number of companies at the end.
@Anonymous
Not saying that you are wrong, however, Firefox does this, too. Just research “Firefox prefetching” or “Firefox speculative connections”. Also, it’s worth noting that not all Chromium-based browsers make use of prefetching by default:
https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/340
How can Vivaldi pay it’s employees?
“Vivaldi has about 1.5 million users and 50 employees, said Chief Executive and founder Jon von Tetzchner, who helped launch another alternative browser, Opera, in the 1990s. Vivaldi isn’t yet profitable.”
https://www.cnet.com/news/vivaldi-3-0-becomes-the-newest-web-browser-to-block-ads-and-trackers/
Brave has 100 employees, and 20 million monthly users. And even Brave isn’t profitable.
Is von Tetzchner that rich?
Have you missed the option “Allow ads from our partners (support Vivaldi)”?
It’s enabled by default. Google ads bad, our partners ads good, mkay?
No idea what you want to say. The question is how can Vivaldi still operate if it isn’t profitable. When Brave is not profitable with almost 20 million users, Vivaldi will make basically nothing.
@Anonymous
In defense of Vivaldi, the ads portion (which could have been handled better – obviously) does not allow ads from Google through. All it does is allow ads on select search providers search pages (Bing, DDG, Startpage, Ecosia). 3 of those 4 search engine generally have a good privacy reputation, so its not like they are automatically whitelisting Google or Yahoo.
In short, yes he is. As mentioned in an article (https://vivaldi.com/de/blog/vivaldi-business-model) on their site Vivaldi has mutliple revenue streams. But much like Brave, I’m sure the Vivaldi browser wouldn’t exist without it’s founder’s funds from the Opera days.
Well, Amazon didn’t make a profit for their first ten? years; they had great cash flow and now have revenue sufficient to be in the list of the top ten countries in the world in terms of GDP. Bizarre…
As long as Vivaldi has cash sufficient to support the company as they see it, regardless of where it originates and they can pay their debts, they don’t have to be profitable.
Why all these small browser companies exist, IDK; benevolence as a business model for profit is shaky at best. Google would be in the same list above as Amazon, maybe these companies are are betting on anti-trust breakups to claim market share.
I wish Vivaldi all the best, but they should try to focus on the Android browser instead of adding useless features such as the clock or the break mode to the desktop version.
I agree, they should, but my guess is they won’t. They will continue with their vision of including other useless and questionable features into it. But I sort of blame their community for that. From what I’ve seen the community is a tight-knit group of power users who have the weirdest of needs and expectations for how a browser should behave and they are the ones posting weird suggestions and others echoing them and Vivaldi team implementing them, because that’s all they see in terms of feedback. The real complaints get drowned in a sea of these useless requests by power users.
I’ve also noticed how Vivadi’s tabs behave – how tabs open, in what order they open, where they open and when a tab is closed, which tab gets activated. On all other browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Opera and everything else, tabs behave the same, normal way, with Vivaldi, I just can’t set them up to behave normally, despite the options that are included.
I personally just don’t think they are a big enough team to squash all the bugs which every chromium update will bring.Some of bugs are years old even.
I have truly tried to like the browser and i do wish them luck,but adding features instead of fixing the bugs is a big no-no.
New features are just a bait to reel in new users but the forum is full of bug issues.I simply cannot use a browser with such a high bug number.
Do you still have to use a third party extension for an extremely BASIC function..that is, to be able to set a zero cache? I mean this is NOT the year 2000 and very few are on dial up these days. The other browsers have always been capable of setting a zero cache without the need for an extension!
It has some good ideas but the ui still feels sluggish.
Well, Vivaldi doesn’t run native Chromium UI, the UI layer which is the close sourced part about this browser but it was made with HTML, CSS and JS, so it is like running the chromium engine inside an iframe. so it is going to be always slower than any other Chromium browser and there is nothing you or they can do about it. It kind of shows the mentality they had when they did the browser when they decided to use html, css and js but oh well.
The sad part about this feature is how it is there to remind us even more how all this BS has made people more zombies than they already were, people that seem to have less control of their lives that even the browser has to “unplug” people from work because I guess humans can’t do it themselves. It is just weird and more ways to exploit and promote unlawful lock-downs to make people think these companies care about their users.
I read couple articles about this and it still sounds stupid anyway. I don’t even know why a company would think this was a good idea to add but it seems to be how Vivaldi does things, add and change stuff to their browser because they can, doesn’t matter if it affects performance, users or not.
I donno, Vivaldi did listen to its users when USAtoday wasn’t working. I heard several other sites were fixed as well. The idea behind the UI is particularly meant to have these features and options so it’s not that big a deal for me. It’s also faster than it used to be, my only complaint is that in Linux, the window sizes aren’t always remembered as they should be.Vivaldi was never meant to be just another chromium browser, so little differences in how it works is expected. It’s for power users, I don’t see anyone complaining about Qutebrowser’s vim like keybindings and lack of plugin support or features.
When I’m offline I disconnect the entire computer from the Internet.
For Linux use the network icon in the desktop panel.
For Windows use the Powershell script (UpDownEthernet) posted here a few months ago.
Maintaining situational awareness raises your knowledge of the local data transfers (such as advertising updates).
For a faster more secure computer use:
https://www.w10privacy.de/english-home/instructions-1/
I see an update after this feature proves to break the browser.
I honestly wonder how many people use such features (Digital Wellbeing and all that nonsese).
>still no option to edit their bloated contexts menus
Well, maybe one day…