A New Web Browser Called ‘Vivaldi’ Enters The Ring, And It Looks Fantastic

What happens when Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, hates the direction his beloved browser’s taken? He spearheads development of a brand-new browser, of course. Enter Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser that makes it clear about who it targets: power-users.

Vivaldi might be one of the friendliest browsers to have ever launched, with Tetzchner saying, “We are making a browser for our friends.” You can get a feel for that notion at the browser’s welcome page where its background story, future plans, plead for feedback, and the entire Vivaldi development team can be perused.

One of the main goals of Vivaldi is to help people get more done on the Web, and for those who favor it, with as little mouse work as possible. Even on the welcome page mentioned above, keyboard shortcuts get a huge mention, and unlike most browsers which force you to do a Google search to figure them all out, Vivaldi lists them all inside of the settings screen.

As seen in the screenshot above, Vivaldi is an extremely clean looking browser, with flat colors all over the place and no wasted space. On the left side is a pane that’s used to access things like mail, contacts, and bookmarks. At the bottom, a hovered-over URL will show itself in the whitespace of the bar, while at the right, users have access to a “hide images” button as well as a zoom slider.

What stands out about Vivaldi right away is that for each website visited, the browser will try to grab one of its substantial colors in order to highlight its tab. For Techgage, it’s highlighted a dark teal blue; Facebook, blue; YouTube, red; TechCrunch, green; reddit, black, and so forth. It seems simple, but in the limited time I’ve used it so far, I have to admit that I find it quite appealing.

On account of the fact that this browser was born as the result of some spite for the direction Opera took, I hope it’s safe to say that what we can see and what we have heard about Vivaldi so far will remain in tact. So far, I am quite impressed. In fact, if it were not for the fact that I use a couple of browser extensions a lot (LastPass, especially), I’d move over to it for an in-depth test.

I am pretty excited to see where this browser goes. If you happen to give it a try yourself, let us know what you think in the comments!