Vivaldi

Description

Vivaldi was born of frustration. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner had co-founded Opera Software in 1995 and headed it for fifteen years. Opera was the browser that invented tabbed browsing, speed dial and a dozen other features that the rest of the industry eventually copied. Then new management took over and threw out the Presto engine and rebuilt Opera as a stripped-down Chrome clone. The manager for bookmarks vanished. Customization went with it. Many of Opera’s most loyal users had nowhere to go.

Von Tetzchner founded Vivaldi Technologies in Oslo in 2013 together with co-founder Tatsuki Tomita, bringing about twenty former Opera engineers with him. The first technical preview was released in January 2015. Version 1.0 followed in April 2016. The company never took outside investment — Vivaldi Technologies is employee-owned, and it makes money through search partnerships rather than through user data.

The browser is based on the Blink engine and the V8 JavaScript engine of Chromium, so this implies that it supports the modern web standards and is compatible with Chrome extensions. What Vivaldi does build on top of that foundation is something Chrome and Edge don’t offer: deep, granular control over how the browser looks and behaves. As of July 2025, the number of active users of Vivaldi was 3.5 million.

CUSTOMIZATION

Vivaldi does not see the browser interface as something the user should accept, but rather something the user should configure. The tab bar can be located at the top, bottom, left or right of the window. The address bar is independent of it. Tab shapes, corner rounding, icon display and spacing are all adjustable through built-in settings — no extensions needed, no about:config editing required.

The theme editor is used to set custom accent colors, background images, and transparency. Adaptive color mode – reads the dominant colors from whatever website the user currently has open, and automatically shifts the color scheme of the browser to match. Some users find it pleasant. Others find it distracting and switch it off. Both are valid configurations.

Quick Commands, activated by a keyboard shortcut, opens a pop-up panel where the user can type in any browser action without having to touch the mouse — navigate to a specific tab, open settings, trigger a command. Keyboard shortcuts are available for almost every function in the browser and users can reassign them all. Mouse gestures execute actions from directional strokes with the mouse button pressed; the default set of gestures covers the most common tab and navigation tasks, and users can define their own.

Command Chains allow users to record chains of actions and assign the entire chain to one shortcut or tool bar button. It’s the closest thing to a browser macro system that you can get without installing an extension.

TAB MANAGEMENT

Vivaldi’s tab management goes beyond most browsers. Tab Stacks work by dropping one tab on another — the two become one stack item on the tab bar. Click to expand, and click again to collapse. As of version 7.5, each stack can have its own color label, which makes it easy to differentiate stacks at a glance when several of them are open.

Tab Stack Tiling opens the tabs within a tab stack as a split screen grid within the browser window — two tabs side by side, or four in a two by two grid. No extensions, no extra windows. It’s all in the same browser frame.

Workspaces provide separate browsing environments within a single window. Each workspace has its own tab bar and has its own set of tabs that are open. A user could have work tabs in one workspace, personal browsing in another, and a research project in a third, switching between them with a click, instead of having to deal with multiple windows.

Tab hibernation is used to suspend the background tabs to regain CPU and memory. Hibernation may occur either manually or automatically after a configurable period of inactivity. Sessions store a named snapshot of all open tabs for later — different from workspaces in that sessions store a saved state to restore on demand, rather than live environments running in parallel.

SIDE PANEL AND WEB PANELS

The side panel extends along one edge of the browser window and provides access to the built-in tools of Vivaldi without leaving the current page. From it users can access bookmarks, history, notes, the mail client, the calendar, the feed reader, downloads, and a reading list.

Web Panels take this further. Any website can be pinned into the side panel as a narrow view, mobile-width view. WhatsApp, telegram, news feed, to-do app — if the site has a responsive mobile layout, it works as a web panel. The panel remains available at the click of a button and persists from one session to the next.

BUILT-IN TOOLS

Vivaldi ships a full email client, a calendar, and feed reader inside the browser — no extensions involved. The mail client supports IMAP and POP3 accounts, arranging messages with folders, filters and a two pane reading layout. The calendar uses Google Calendar as an importer and CalDAV servers for connection. The feed reader subscribes to RSS and Atom feeds from any site the user subscribes to.

Notes store richly formatted text with optional screenshot attachments, in folders and synced between devices. The built-in screenshot tool takes a picture of a visible part or the entire page and is annotatable. Reader View removes ads and navigation from articles pages and displays readable, resizable text. The translator translates pages directly without sending content to other services.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Vivaldi comes with a built in ad and tracker blocker based on Adblock Plus filter lists. Version 7.5 introduced support for other types of rules — badfilter, strict3p and strict1p — increasing what the blocker can catch. Blocking can be configured globally or site by site. Version 7.7 redesigned the Privacy Dashboard to be a widget displaying a running total of blocked trackers and ads.

Vivaldi supports DNS over https with configurable custom DNS provider. Sync data travels end-to-end encrypted, meaning that Vivaldi’s own servers cannot read it. The browser does not store browsing history or create user profiles.

In March 2025, Vivaldi teamed up with the Swiss-based company Proton to build Proton VPN directly into the desktop browser. Users sign in with a Vivaldi account to activate the free tier, which includes unlimited data bandwidth across servers in five randomly selected countries with no ads and no logging of their activities. A paid Proton VPN subscription opens up more than 13,000 servers in 120+ countries.

Vivaldi has publicly pledged to not include any AI features in the browser. Von Tetzchner has said that AI assistants involve sending user data through third-party servers, which is against the browser’s approach to privacy.

EXTENSIONS

All Chrome Web Store extensions work in Vivaldi without modification — it’s the same Chromium base. The more important decision is what Vivaldi won’t do: unlike Google, Vivaldi has pledged to support Manifest V2 extensions instead of forcing a migration to Manifest V3 on Google’s schedule. This is important to users who use extension-based ad blockers and other tools that the Manifest V3 API blocks.

PLATFORMS AND SYNC

Vivaldi runs on Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux. Linux users receive .deb and .rpm packages, a tarball, and a Snap package. The Android version has most of the desktop features: tab stacks, web panels, workspaces all made the port. The iOS version came later and supports reader view, the tab stack pane, link previews and custom search engines.

Vivaldi Sync is a sync tool that keeps bookmarks, passwords, notes, history, tabs and settings in sync across all platforms using an end-to-end encrypted channel. In December 2021, Vivaldi was the first browser to be available on Android Automotive, running on the infotainment system of the Polestar 2 electric vehicle. Vivaldi is the default browser on the Cinnamon Community Edition version of the Manjaro Linux distribution, too.