Vivaldi 7.0 – You won't recognize him
We can talk a lot about functionality and the number of settings, about privacy and speed, but let's be honest – when we get acquainted with any application, we first of all always evaluate it visually. This will then be a study of what it can do at all, this will then be a search for the most optimal settings, but even before that the user already has a certain impression – just at first glance at the interface.
This is probably correct. Once upon a time, the outstanding aircraft designer Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev said that only beautiful airplanes fly well. There really is something to this. After all, a stylish and well-developed external design often indicates that the designer showed no less care when developing internal components hidden from the user’s view. And this also fully applies to browsers.
Today we present to you Vivaldi 7.0 – a new version of the browser that has received a significantly redesigned interface design, as well as several equally interesting and noticeable improvements. Let's see together what has changed.
Beauty that doesn't require sacrifice
So, new design. We decided to preserve as much as possible all the functionality of the interface that users have long been accustomed to, but at the same time make it look completely new – lighter, more stylish and pleasing to the eye in all respects, from the size and shape of elements, to the color palette and set of icons. Actually, this is what Vivaldi now looks like by default after installation:
And this is not just a new design – it’s just a template that you can change at your own discretion to make it as comfortable as possible for you. In the theme settings, you still have a lot of options available to you, including color scheme, background image, and even your own set of icons. You can also choose a more classic view: menu V – Settings – Appearance – Interface view – Compact. So, as they say, there is something for every taste.
We have also made a number of changes to the Express Panel. By default, it is represented by three groups of bookmarks by category. Thus, we were able to further relieve the load on the browser start screen by distributing partner bookmarks into different groups. Of course, you can delete them if you don't need them. But if you use these services and online stores, you can help us in the further development of the browser – your use of default bookmarks brings us a small commission, which is very useful in our difficult financial times.
However, if you looked carefully at the previous screenshot, you saw not only these three groups, but also something else. Let's see what else we have prepared.
Widget panel
This idea was suggested to us by users – in fact, most of the ideas come from you, but we never tire of thanking you for your contribution to the development of the browser. And the idea was simple – to create a kind of personal information center on the Express panel, where you can immediately take in all the important points that interest you every day – time and date, new email messages, frequently visited bookmarks, useful informers, online games and much more. . Here you can leave stickers with memories for yourself, view calendar events, receive notifications about new publications in news feeds, and much more.
Yes, of course, this is only the first version, there is still much that we and you would like to see there, but this is only the beginning of the development of a new convenient function. Together we can make it much more functional and useful. We are already working on this and are looking forward to new interesting ideas from you. And since we mentioned news feeds, we have something to show here too.
Taking control of the flow of information
So, we have had the client for viewing news feeds built in for a long time and, in general, there were no special complaints from you about it, except for one thing – they are difficult to manage. The fact is that today we live in a world of information and it is important for us to keep abreast of all the news. And if at first it may be a dozen other news feeds, then gradually it all grows to indecent sizes and it becomes difficult to cope with this flow. Now it will be easier to do this – we have added the ability to create folders into which you can sort all your news subscriptions.
By the way, if you are annoyed by advertising on YouTube – and, to be honest, I don’t know people who wouldn’t be annoyed by them – the news client built into Vivaldi can make your life much easier. By subscribing to the channel, you will receive all new videos directly in your browser, and you will be able to view them without advertising in any version – directly in the news client, in full screen mode, in unpinned video. It just works. Personally, I stopped going to YouTube a long time ago – I put everything interesting for myself into the news client and watch videos without ads.
And there is another positive point here. Probably everyone is familiar with the situation when you went to your favorite channel to watch the latest video, and an hour later you discover that you are simply wandering around the service and viewing something that you did not plan, and you don’t even understand how you managed to spend so much time absorbing information , which, in general, you didn’t need. You were simply picked up by the information flow and carried away to distant places. So, the built-in news client protects you from this scourge in a way that you will never be able to protect yourself. You receive only the information that you really need.
Unless, however, you decide to subscribe to everything that catches your eye. Then, of course, just folders and sorting. At a minimum, then it will be easier to delete all subscriptions from the trash folder at once. But let's move on.
How to start over
A related topic to news is mail. And everything is fine with it, but the bad thing is that there is a lot of it. And, sometimes, just a lot. By gradually processing all received messages, going through correspondence, looking through archived letters, you can get very deep. And then carefully scroll up the list of messages to get to the latest letters. We decided to simplify this task and added a special button with which you can go to the latest message in one click. And begin a new dive into the postal depths.
In addition, we added another very convenient little thing – the ability to quickly switch between the “Reply” and “Reply all” modes when replying to a received message if there were several addresses in the list.
Small joys
In addition to the “big” new products, we have also prepared several less noticeable, but no less significant. For example, we have redesigned the system for synchronizing data between browsers. If earlier the synchronization process was initiated with some delay, upon certain events or after a certain time, now we have tried to make sure that it is carried out in real time: immediately after you have made some changes to the synchronized data – created a note, saved a bookmark , changed the setting, etc. For now, this only works on the desktop, but a mobile update will soon be released that will support this synchronization mode.
And by the way, now web panels – the websites and services you place in the sidebar – are also synchronized. When you create a web dashboard in one browser, after a couple of seconds it will appear in another browser. Not in the sidebar, but in the list of web panels on the Windows tab. You can manually drag it from there to the sidebar. But be lenient: the function is still very young, with a bunch of teenage problems that we will gradually solve. And we will decide faster if you send us your comments and wishes.
That's all for now. The full list of changes can be found at this pageand download the new version of the browser from the official website.
Thank you all for preparing this version and see you again very soon when new mobile versions of Vivaldi are released.
