Chrome-Killer Vivaldi Web Browser Hits Beta With New Features

Short Bytes: Vivaldi is a browser that has the capability to challenge Google Chrome and initiate a full-scale browser war in a true sense. This web browser from ex-Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner has now grown up to achieve the beta status and is available for download.

From past many years, Google Chrome has remained at the top of its game for many years and kept improving the user-experience all along. But, it has now become infamous as the “RAM-killer” browser that recently saw a new competitor called Microsoft Edge.

I used Microsoft Edge for some time, liked its speed and cleaner feel, but the lack of extensions pissed me off. Few months before trying Edge, I decided to give Vivaldi a try as it was updated with an option to import the Google Chrome extensions. As a power user, I found the Vivaldi browser very appealing and was waiting for a beta release.

For those who don’t know, it’s a web browser from ex-Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Along with going the minimalistic way, this browser makes your internet experience very immersive as it keeps changing its color when you switch to another website – fossBytes is blue, Google is red, TechCrunch is green and so on.

Vivaldi comes with tons of customization options – you can place your browser tabs anywhere, change the position of address bar, play with keyboard shortcut and create your own mouse gestures

With the help of Quick Commands that’s just like the ‘Spotlight Search’, you can open tabs, history, bookmarks etc with single keyboard shortcuts. Another great addition comes in the form of Tab stacks that will allow you to group multiple tabs into one. Just drag one tab over to another for a seamless grouping and clean all the mess.

During the technical preview phase, the browser has been downloaded more than two million times and is built with the Chromium engine under the hood.

Vivaldi also comes with its own Mail client called M3 and great note taking capability.

Talking about the Chrome extensions, this feature works fine but the windows size of the extensions is very small. Added to this, notifications from app have a hard time appearing on the screen.