Vivaldi

What Vivaldi is

Vivaldi is a free Chromium-based browser from Vivaldi Technologies in Oslo. It renders pages with the same engine as Chrome, so extensions, banking sites and web apps behave as expected, but nearly everything around the engine is custom: a sidebar that hosts mail, calendar, feeds, notes and web panels; tab stacks and tiled tab grids; workspaces that separate projects; mouse gestures; and Quick Commands, a search box that runs browser actions as well as searches. The browser ships under Vivaldi's own end user licence agreement (https://vivaldi.com/privacy/vivaldi-end-user-license-agreement/), so it is proprietary freeware rather than open source, even though the company publishes source archives for the components it modifies at vivaldi.com/source.

How a working day with it looks

The profile lives under your user folder, so backing it up is a folder copy rather than an export routine. An optional Vivaldi account turns on end-to-end encrypted sync for bookmarks, passwords, history, notes, settings and open tabs; without an account the browser is fully usable and simply stays local. Dragging one tab onto another creates a stack, and the two-level tab bar shows stacks in a second row instead of hiding them behind a dropdown. The mail client, calendar and feed reader run as sidebar panels and can be pinned open, which is the main reason people switch: one window handles the browser plus the three or four web services they would otherwise juggle in separate tabs.

Settings and limits worth knowing

Startup behaviour is worth tuning early. Sleeping tabs hibernate background tabs after a configurable idle period, and pinned tabs can be lazy-loaded so they are not all fetched at launch; both settings live under Settings > Tabs. The built-in blocker has three levels (no blocking, block trackers, block trackers and ads) and it is deliberately simple, so heavy users still add a full content blocker extension. Speed dial, workspaces and the mail client all write into the same profile, so a damaged profile costs you more than it would in a stock browser. Vivaldi publishes snapshot builds weekly and stable builds roughly every six weeks, and the Windows installer is a single x64 executable with no bundled extras.

Who should look elsewhere

Choose LibreWolf or Firefox if you need a browser whose code you can audit and build yourself, or if you want no account layer at all. Choose Chrome or Edge for the deepest managed enterprise policy support. If your machine still runs Windows 7 or 8.1, you are outside Vivaldi's supported range. For everyone else who wants a browser that also absorbs a mail client, a feed reader and a note pile, the bundled suite is the whole point of the product.