Vivaldi 6.2 speeds up performance and adds this unique feature
Vivaldi 6.2 is the newest version of Vivaldi Technologies web browser. The new version marks a major milestone for the project, as it speeds up the opening of new browser windows significantly in many cases. Also new is the ability to customize the address field output when you type by selecting the sources Vivaldi pulls information from.
Vivaldi Technologies notes that it is now rendering browser windows through React portals. The effect of the code refactoring is that the browser opens windows faster now and that it uses less memory for browser windows.
The company explains that the JavaScript Framework Portal Windows derives from React. Vivaldi engineers worked on the project for several years to implement the feature in the browser. The main goal was to reduce memory and CPU usage, and also introduce improvements that would not have been possible otherwise.
Vivaldi Technologies ran benchmarks to compare the before and after performance. Vivaldi's window opening speed improved by 37% after the changes were implemented claims the company. The benchmarks were run on a low-end Intel 2GHz Core i3 processor. Compared to an older version of the browser from 2018, windows opened 64% faster, according to Vivaldi Technologies.
Vivaldi 6.2: Address Field customizations
Vivaldi 6.2 ships with several new features and improvements. One of the most interesting ones is the ability to change the priority of address field items that the browser displays when users type in the address bar.
All modern web browsers use several sources they pull data from: from search, the user's bookmarks, the browsing history, or pages visited frequently.
Vivaldi users may control the output of the browser in Vivaldi 6.2 by changing priorities and removing entire sources from the list of sources Vivaldi uses. It is possible to turn off search entirely to only get local results, or to keep search and bookmarks, but disable the browsing history.
You can change the the priority and data sources of the output in the following way in Vivaldi 6.2:
- Select the Vivaldi Menu and then Settings.
- Switch to Address Bar in the sidebar of the Settings window that opens.
- Scroll down to Drop-Down Menu Priority.
- There, you may uncheck any of the available sources:
- Autocomplete Results.
- Search.
- Bookmarks.
- Search Suggestions.
- Nicknames.
- Frequently Visited Pages.
- Typed History.
- Browser History.
- Most of the options may also be moved. Select them and use drag & drop, or the up/down icons in the lower right corner of the interface.
- Note that the first two options, Autocomplete Result and Search, can't be moved at this time.
There is a handy Reset Priority button to restore the original configuration at any time.
Other changes in Vivaldi 6.2
There is a new clear browsing data button in the History panel now. It allows you to quickly delete history entries.
Select the History icon in Vivaldi's side panel and activate the erase button once the history is displayed. There, you get the options to delete data for the past hour, day, week, 4 week period or all time, and may select the databases that you want processed.
Selecting all will process all of them, but there is also the option to select individual databases, e.g., downloads or browsing history, to have them processed only.
Another useful feature of Vivaldi is the ability to follow YouTube channels without Google Account. Vivaldi uses YouTube's RSS feed for that. You can check out my guide from 2022 on subscribing to YouTube channels without Google account.
Vivaldi 6.2 improves the discoverability of the feature according to the announcement, but we could not get this to work on YouTube.
Vivaldi users on macOS may now use the geolocation service of the macOS system, the Apple Location Service.
The built-in mail client, one of Vivaldi's many features that make it stand out, supports new mail filters in the new version. You may switch between displaying text menu and icons only for the mail client's filter view under Settings > Mail > Filter View Buttons.
The mail client support's FastMail's OAuth login system in the latest version, which means that users can log in to their accounts without using an app-specific password in Vivaldi 6.2.
Vivaldi 6.2 is available via the browser's automatic updating systema and as a standalone download from the developer website.
Closing Words
Vivaldi 6.2 is a big release for the company and also for users of the web browser. It improves the browser's speed and memory usage, and introduces new unique customization options next to that.
Now You: have you tried Vivaldi 6.2?
Proprietary nonsense.
dumb replies should always be allowed on lbanks
It will always be a terrible browser.
Since the UI is not native, it will always cause issues beyond performance.
It is so easy to break the UI to the point you only have to ‘task manager’ it.
Also, extensions will not work like Tab Groups and all that.
Yeah the approach is cheaper and faster by using a non native UI, but it is not the right one.
Opera does the same, and Yandex too, for some reason Yandex was the one I always felt better in terms of performance and CPU usage.
The cool thing about Vivaldi is that you can hide anything you want, but I never understood how they went this approach with the Browser, but their adblocker sucks, it is so basic it is barely usable in many websites today. It is also using WebRequest API, which will be removed when Manifestv3 happens, of course they say it will be ‘easy to fix’ but why didn’t they make it truly native as well so it doesn’t depend on APIs that might get removed, especially when they knew about Manifiestv3 when they finally released their adblocker?
That’s how weird this company is, makes the ‘easy approach’ but then it just decides not to care about the adblocker or anything important, but useless stuff like email, and RSS feed and the Mastodon stuff.
Vivaldi company doesn’t even care about their users and the defaults, that’s why they blame PrivacyTest website, and then start attacking the developer because “BuT BrAve EmpLoyEE”, instead of just fixing the defaults and turn the adblocker on, by default.
I mean, never forget how they enable by default the “Partners” adblocking list, which contains their search engine partners, including Bing, because while Vivaldi CEO loves to talk crap about Microsoft in one hand, the other will receive the Microsoft money, while allowing ALL the Bing tracking network requests.
Also, they never fixed and made the whole ‘ping’ optional, the one where they send your device information every 24 hours. Yeah, it is not something bad to have, but they don’t care to give you the choice to stop it.
Also they don’t stop Google from seeing you are updating Chromium components and extensions, they know you connected to Google servers and what you are doing. Just like how they do the same with Safe browsing, Google DNS which is turned on by default and the option “Block ads in abusive sites” which is managed by Google as well.
You can see all that in PRIVACY page in Vivaldi settings by default, so it seems they really don’t care much about the privacy they say they do, but I mean, not developing Adblocker further and just being pretty much the same for 3 years or so, is ridiculous.
So while it might ‘look nice’ and be ‘customizable’ they weird decisions and approaches and development priorities, make it hard to really like it.
I rather have features than performance. Having said that, currently, i see no performance difference on ie: brave vs vivaldi (both with shield off) in synthetic benchmarks, and opening windows, dragging out/in tabs have greatly improved and was my only catch with vivaldi, not anymore.
If i want a bare-bones clone of chrome i have a ton of browsers to choose from, if i want features there’s only vivaldi, it’s the only browser that is really unique in what they do, and its features are OPTIONS, you can disable mail, feeds, calendar, workgroups, tabs stacks… you can even disable the ability to install extensions from the chrome store.
I wish they could stop adding stuff and worked on performance for once. Yes I am running it on a Sandy Bridge but Chrome doesn’t care about that. Edge doesn’t, Brave doesn’t.
Even Firefox has been getting better.
I’m finding it hard to believe that the devs of this are the same devs who back in the day stuffed Opera full of random features AND managed to keep it as brisk as Chrome while running on its very own browser engine.
All the devs are doing right now is stealing the Chromium homework and doing nothing to build up on it, nothing revolutionary. Just stitching their own bloated webapps to perfection and ruining it.
But they DID work on performance in this build. Just check it yourself. I think they sometimes do the missteps like adding game with the browser of email client, but you always can run it minimal with all that stuff turned off (the browser does not use any resources on them if they are turned off). I like the team’s attitude and codex, they are just “nice guys”, hope they will be commercially successful with such approaches, but for now they have more “whistles” then raw browsing improvements over Chrome/Brave for example. Let’s see what happens next.