The most useful things I find that Vivaldi does, and the main reasons I use it are the multiple speed dials, the built in notes, and the stacking tabs.
Multiple speed dial pages make keeping track of the things that I do at work much easier. I have four projects that require a large set of docs, resources, and links. Along with that I have my general work links (things like vacation, time sheets and ticketing systems). Of course I also have non work things in the default speed dial.
The built in notes contain all of the things that I have learned over the years, sets of commands that are too long to type for the amount of times that I use them or that are too complex for me to remember. For six years I’ve been collecting these notes, and I back them up, and email them to myself, store in cloud servers, and now with Vivaldi, I can finally sync them.
Lastly the stacking of tabs. Best research assistant ever. Collect everything related to a new subject together, stack the tab, and maybe tile it to reference concepts from other pages.
Up to this point, everything has been either something we saw in the old Opera, or something that showed up and barely got noticed. Where Vivaldi really end up shining is in the small innovations.
THE HISTORY SEARCH IS REVOLUTIONARY!!!!
I cannot overstate what a difference it is when you go looking for something a few days, or weeks later. When you are learning about a new concept or technology and don’t really know what you are looking for, or don’t have the basics and don’t know where you are going to end up. After you have learned a bit about the new things, and you understand some of what you have read, you end up realizing that you stumbled upon something that really interest you now that you understand it, but you had only glossed over it initially and didn’t understand it, but now you are trying to search for it, but you can’t get the search engine to get you in the right direction. You go into the vivaldi://history go to the month selector, and drag selector over the general time range you think it was, start searching for the unique thing you remember from your previous explorations, and Viola, there it is.
Finally a little thing I love but it bugs me that I can’t do it programatically. The screenshot tool getting shots of the entire webpage render, not just the viewport, but the full HTML render in a picture! I wrote a small plugin for PCI auditing and tried to access that functionality, but found it wasn’t accessible without going into ui debug mode with the ecmascript inspector, and passing in flags on Vivaldi start, so I ended up just using the print function and having users click on the print as pdf. Since that is my biggest gripe about Vivaldi, I can’t really say that I have any gripes about the browser, I actually love it. It’s been my daily driver for quite a while, and it drives me nuts when I get forced into using something else (Looking at those pages that use NTLM)
Still waiting on the email client, but since I use Mutt it’s not really a big need, just a nice to have. Someday.
