Vivaldi 6.9
Well, Vivaldi is here and installed on my computer. People who have been reading my blog or who have talked to me on Fosstodon will know I’m a huge fan of Vivaldi’s. I can’t claim that I use every feature for the simple reason no one ever does. Vivaldi is packed with so many features you can make it work your way and another Vivaldi user may use it entirely differently, but Vivaldi will be the perfect browser for both of you. So, what’s in 6.9 that’s exciting?
So 6.9 is not a .0 release (obviously), so it’s not going to be loaded to the gills with new features. It’s more iterative than anything else. That said, there are still some interesting things in it.
Renaming tabs.
I’ve seen mixed reactions to this one already. “Why would anybody want to rename a tab?” For you, maybe the answer is going to be “you won’t”. For me, I find it handy when I’m looking at multiple products on a single page. I will often load something I’m interested in into a new tab and then continue browsing. I have literally hundreds of tabs open at any given time (which Vivaldi helps me manage skillfully), and sometimes those tabs will not have an particularly descriptive name associated with it. This is especially true if the name of the tab is long, and it’s getting shortened. For example, I printed out one of these for one of my daughters last week and I still have the tab open. The tab at the top says, “3D Printab”. Super useful right? I’m sure we all know what that means at a glance. Instead, Vivaldi allows me to rename that tab to something more informative, “3dTurtle”. Readable at a glance instead of requiring a mouse hover to get the full 20 character title to the page so I can read a book to figure out what my tab is for. Now I’ll close that tab because I’m done with that print and it was only useful right now as an example in this post.
Renaming also works for tab stacks. This is even more useful to me because tab stacks are basically folders in your tab bar. It’s less useful if the title of the stack is just the title of the last page you looked at in the stack. If you’re researching something and you’ve got a collection of tabs in a single stack, it can be handy to rename the stack to let you know at a glance what’s in that stack. It’s like giving a folder/directory a name instead of just assuming the folder/directory should have the same name as one of the files in it. I think we can all see the benefit of that.
Cleaner synced tabs structure.
This one is more housekeeping than anything. If you’ve got a lot of tabs and you sync those tabs with Vivaldi’s cloud services to have on other devices, be it another computer or a mobile device, it’s better to have those tabs organized in a tree structure rather than a giant list of links. This isn’t a “killer feature”, but it’s handy and it makes my life easier.
Dragging files from the downloads panel.
I will use the heck out of this one. It doesn’t even matter where you’ve saved a file. As long as it’s still there and you still have it in your download panel, you can just drag it out onto your desktop or to a folder of your choosing and you’ll get a copy of that file. Super useful. I do wish there was a setting to change this to moving the file instead of copying the file since I think that’ll be more what I’m wanting to do, but I expect we’ll see something along those lines in a future release. It’s just too obvious to escape the developers at Vivaldi.
Honestly, there’s a huge list of changes and fixes that went into this release, but I’m not going to go through all of them. The changelog is interesting reading for anybody who uses Vivaldi as their primary browser. I will say that every time Vivaldi comes out with a new release, whether it’s a point release like this one or a major .0 release like we’re expecting with 7.0, there’s always something in there that makes my life easier. I can’t say enough good about it. If you’re using Chrome or a Chromium based browser, you should give it a try. It’s as powerful or as simple as you want it to be.
Day 12 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
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