Back
in 1996, what began as a research project for Telenor, the largest
Norweigan communications company in the world, evolved into a completely
separate company, Opera Software. The company’s Opera web browser
became a cult favorite, and is particularly favored among privacy
advocates.
Now
one of Opera’s original creators, Opera Software co-founder Jon von
Tetzchner, is working with a “team of browser building pioneers” to
launch Vivaldi 1.0, a new browser set on making “web browsers powerful
again,” according to Tetzchner.
“Vivaldi
1.0 adapts to you, not the other way around,” he wrote in a press
release sent to Digital Trends earlier today. “We made Vivaldi the most
customizable browser in existence, based on feedback provided by
millions of users. In fact, there are more than one million different
ways to make Vivaldi your perfect browser.”
Vivaldi
aims to achieve this by stacking its features, consisting of things
expected from a web browser like Bookmarks and Downloads, in a condensed
pile off to the left-hand side of the screen. There’s even a space for
notes, which could come in handy for students and researchers looking to
save snippets of text or screenshots for use later on.
Though
it feels a little gimmicky in practice, Vivaldi 1.0 also features mouse
gestures letting you “transfer a flick of the wrist into almost any
action” by holding down the right mouse key. This comes on top of more
traditional keyboard shortcut support.
With
the help of Chromium, which powers Vivaldi, not only does the browser
perform smoothly at bringing up web pages, but it also takes up
significantly less memory than Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
In
a direct comparison of all four browsers displaying only the Digital
Trends homepage, Safari occupied the most RAM at 355.1MB, while Firefox
and Chrome took up 254.7MB and 188.8MB, respectively. Meanwhile, Vivaldi
only used 62.2MB when carrying out the same task.
“Millions
of people have already agreed that they want a better browser, one that
puts them in control, von Tetzchner continues. “Everything we build is
in service of the user. We have no investors and their agendas to
dictate our progress. There’s no exit strategy and we’re here to stay.
All we want is to give people a browser they’re proud to use and that
we’re proud to call Vivaldi.”
While we didn’t expect much going in, after testing out Vivaldi for
ourselves, we must say the only thing that didn’t impress was Bing’s
position as the default search engine. Everything else was considerably
cleaner, faster, and less consumptive than its big-time rivals.
Vivaldi’s full release is now available for download at the browser’s homepage.
