Vivaldi 5.4 for Android with improved privacy stats launches

Martin Brinkmann
Aug 17, 2022
Vivaldi
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Vivaldi Technologies released a new version of its Vivaldi for Android browser. Vivaldi 5.4 for Android makes a number of changes, including improved privacy statistics, a new close other tabs option, and a restructured menu.

Vivaldi 5.4 for Android is available already. It is distributed via Google Play, but direct downloads are also provided on the company's website.

The company released the original Vivaldi for Android browser in 2019, and has worked on it ever since.

Vivaldi 5.4 for Android

Vivaldi for Android is a special browser that supports several features that distinguish it from other Android browsers. Take the tab bar for instance; have you seen another major Android browser with a tab bar?

Vivaldi 5.4 introduces an option to close other tabs. Just activate tab controls on the Tabs page and you find the new option listed next to all the existing options, including closing all tabs, stacking tabs, or opening a new tab.

One of the main improvements of the new Vivaldi is the improved tracker and ad blocking dialog. Vivaldi includes native ad-blocking and tracker-blocking functionality; while it needs to be enabled by users, it is providing users of the browser with protection against many ads and tracking scripts.

The change in version 5.4 comes in form of counters that reveal the number of ads and trackers that Vivaldi blocked. The entire dialog that Vivaldi displays is helpful. You may use it to quickly switch blocking for a specific site, and check tracker and ad details.

Vivaldi's main menu, the one that you get when you activate the Vivaldi menu button, has been redesigned. The team used user feedback to restructure entries, and one of the changes is that it is easier now to bookmark a page in the browser.

Last but not least, Vivaldi's sync user interface has seen visual improvements in the release.

Closing Words

Vivaldi 5.4 for Android may look like a smaller release, but it contains improvements that highlight the development team's dedication to detail and getting things right.

Now You: have you tried Vivaldi for Android?

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Vivaldi 5.4 for Android with improved privacy stats launches
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Vivaldi 5.4 for Android with improved privacy stats launches
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Vivaldi Technologies released a new version of its Vivaldi for Android browser, which includes improved privacy stats.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. john said on August 18, 2022 at 9:41 am
    Reply

    vivaldi needs to improve native adblocking, since it does not support procedural filtering, and as a consequence some ads are not blocked, like “promoted” ads on reddit.

    1. Anonymous said on August 18, 2022 at 7:00 pm
      Reply

      @john
      Well, maybe if you understood adblocking technology, you would understand why they will never do it and they will leave it as that because “it is good enough”, just like Opera’s adblocker, they don’t care because it will take time, just look how uBlock and what they have achieved for years, do you really think these lazy companies would do it?
      I mean, Vivaldi is the company that said like 4 years ago they will stop pinging people’s information every 24 hours and they still do it.

      Also, it is call Procedural cosmetics, and there is a difference between Cosmetic Filtering and NETWORK Filtering.
      I mean, do you even understand that cosmetics aren’t blocked? (guess not) they are only html items that are hidden. so it is not really smart to request a really advanced feature for something that doesn’t matter, only because you get bothered by divs and images that might be leftovers, doesn’t mean they will protect anyone from the real ads and trackers and bad scripts and malicious urls.

      The reason Vivaldi can block decently is because you don’t even need an adblocker to block anything in a chromium browser, DevTools already have it in place to block by URL or domain.

      Do you know what scriptlet injection is? that’s surely more important and I am 99.9% sure Vivaldi doesn’t support it, why, because you have to build it, you have to build the resources and make it compatible with your adblocker. What about regex support? oh I am sure that is not there either.
      what about the type of filters you can apply to vivladi network filtering? does it support popup? genericblock? websocket? xhr? subdocument?
      What do they even support? only the usual 3p, script, images and css?
      What about redirect which is really important these days?

      Do you understand what I am even talking about?

      Asking for procedural cosmetics when it can’t even have 100% compatibility with most filters in EasyList it is just not smart only because you hate to see “promoted” whatever on Reddit (the land of the ignorant, and I also guess you don’t even care about your privacy if you are using reddit).

      I mean, do you even understand what ‘Procedural Cosmetics’ really are and how they are achieved by adblocker developers?
      There are not just say “ok I will do it” and it is done. it can be a complex thing because of performance and how they are implemented.
      Cosmetics are done mostly because of the browser, the browser has many css selectors out of the box which you can easily find everywhere.
      Procedural cosmetics are selectors that developers have to build with JS and stuff like that to be able to select more than what the browser can do by it self, in fact, if browsers supported them like :has() or :has-text() then automatically the adblocker would be able to use them.
      But building them requires time, uBlock has many but look at the years it has been built.
      And they are like low priority because they don’t protect nothing, again, network filtering in adblockers should be the priority to they achieve important percentage of compatibility with Easylist and the many lists that don’t use ABP or uBlock or Adguard specific features.

      I mean, come back and tell me when Vivaldi supports at least this

      /^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z]{2}\.)?[0-9a-z]{7,16}\.com\/[a-z](?=[a-z]{0,25}[0-9A-Z])[0-9a-zA-Z]{3,26}\/(?:[1-5]\d{4}|[3-9]\d{3})\??(?:_=\d+|v=\d)?$/$frame,script,xhr,popup,3p,match-case

      That is a rule that uBlock uses that ‘automatically’ blocks some scripts used in some websites. But my point is while uBlock can do that, Easylist will ‘hardcode’ the domains.

      Does vivaldi even blocks domains? you know, block a domain and then you get the message how it can be dangerous? that’s basic when you write ||example^ will it block the contents inside the domain or the domain?

      Again, adblocking is more than ‘cosmetics’ because cosmetics are just hiding and modifying html elements. I doubt Vivaldi will ever support basic cosmetic stuff like the ‘procedural’ :style()

      But again, Vivaldi should work first in the important part anyway, especially if you really don’t know much about it.
      Many things uBlock develops are advanced rules no list or 99% of users would ever use, it is not about that, but basic stuff network filtering besides what is even included in adblockers 8 years ago.

      But question yourself, do you think Vivaldi cares? they don’t. they would rather build useless mail and rss inside the browser.

      The only browser with good support for android extensions is Yandex, they are not easy to load but they work better than Wiki and after the only decent alternative for a native adblocker is Brave, and they are still not perfect, they still do so many mistakes but at least they support most stuff.

      Recently in Nightly Brave for example released a way to do cosmetics in ‘child frames’, do you know how important that is? and I am sure Vivaldi won’t support something like that anytime soon. I mean, even uBlock took a while to support that for a while, because it is complicated to apply cosmetics to an iframe or anything like that, but now it works in Brave… and you are asking for procedural cosmetics? which is like building selectors and making sure they don’t degrade performance too much.
      Look how many procedural cosmetics uBlock add and gorhill says “it is just a test and if it works it will not be removed” kind of text, because they are still JS running and selecting and you might affect a browser performance if you do it wrong obviously.

      Learn and understand, and then you will have priorities set correctly. People like you are the reason why Vivaldi has now a mail and rss client inside the browser, because people at Vivaldi has weird priorities, they add and add features even if their UI implementation is just the worst in all browsers because again, it is CSS, JS and HTML technology that is not too great for a UI.

      Also this is about android, so it is different than desktop, especially since android versions usually don’t even support Extension API so it is trickier to add support to many things desktop can. Just look all Brave had to do to bring cosmetics to Android because they had them working through the extension API.

      And I wouldn’t expect much from Vivaldi when they are not doing anything special to even stop google from tracking you when you update your extensions and do anything that contacts Google.

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