The release notes for Vivaldi are getting harder to find on the browser’s web site, but they are still being updated. The release notes for Vivaldi 1.9.818.49, which was released on May 10, show that this version fixes a few bugs that showed up after Vivaldi 1.9 was released in late April.
The release announcement for Vivaldi 1.9.818.49 just echoes what’s in the release notes.
Vivaldi’s selection of search engine choices has a new member: Ecosia, which bills itself as “the search engine that plants trees with its ad revenue.” Sadly, it appears that Ecosia is very easy to manipulate, since searching for a nonsense word will show at least two ads trying to sell it to you.
Vivaldi 1.9 also fixes a few bugs, including several related to security. The release announcement provides additional details.
A minor update that fixes a single — albeit significant — privacy issue, Vivaldi 1.8.770.56 was announced on April 12.
A few minor issues were identified in the recently-released Vivaldi 1.8 (1.8.770.50), and addressed in yesterday’s release of Vivaldi 1.8.770.54. There’s no urgency about this update unless you’re affected by the problems described in the release announcement.
The latest version of Vivaldi sports a reworked browsing history, and better control over audio, as well as several bug fixes. The release announcement lists all the changes. None of the changes appear to be related to security.
Vivaldi 1.8’s new history interface is a real improvement over what’s available in other browsers. Anyone who spends a lot of time reviewing their browsing history will appreciate the new calendar view.
Despite the improvements, I’d rather the Vivaldi development team spend their time fixing issues with the user interface. The sidebar bookmark editor is still weirdly difficult to use, and it’s also now apparently impossible to remove. There are still inconsistencies in the way links and bookmarks are handled, and the browser still lacks options that would allow complete control over whether links and bookmarks open in new tabs.
Update 2017Apr05: the full version number is 1.8.770.50.
A minor security issue in its installer prompted the release of Vivaldi 1.7.735.48 yesterday. The browser itself isn’t changed in this release – only its installer – but its version number was bumped up from 1.7.735.46 anyway. If you’re already running Vivaldi 1.7.735.46, there’s no need to update, and the browser won’t bother to update itself.
Apparently the people who develop Vivaldi believe that adding a screen capture feature to the browser is a good use of their time. Perhaps if you don’t use any other web browsers, and you only ever need to capture screenshots of web sites, and never of anything outside the browser, this would be a useful feature. The rest of us will use the much more powerful features of general-purpose screen capture tools like ShareX.
Aside from the arguably pointless addition of screen capture, Vivaldi 1.7 further improves audio handling, and includes tweaks for domain expansion in the address bar. More importantly, Vivaldi now warns users when they navigate to a non-encrypted page that prompts for a password.
You can see the complete list of changes for Vivaldi 1.7 in the official release announcement.
A new version of Vivaldi updates the Chromium browser engine and fixes some translation issues.
Perennial also-ran and ugly duckling web browser Vivaldi gets some much-needed improvements in its newest incarnation, version 1.6.
Bookmark, address bar, and link handling have all been improved. For example, hovering over a bookmark now (finally) shows the bookmark’s URL in the status bar. The oddball bookmark editor is still with us, but at least it doesn’t take up so much space in the sidebar. There’s a new option for opening search results in a new tab. Middle-clicking links and bookmarks to open them in a new tab seems finally to be working consistently. And clicking on a URL in the address bar (again, finally) highlights the URL.
It’s nice to see progress on this potentially useful browser, but there’s still work to do. Bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar can be right-clicked and edited or deleted – unless they’re in a folder. There’s still no option to switch to newly-opened tabs.
I continue to use Vivaldi for social media sites, but not as my main browser. Maybe some day Vivaldi really will supplant Firefox, but it isn’t there yet.
Earlier this week a minor update was released for Vivaldi. A new update mechanism was used (for the first time) to distribute this version to existing Vivaldi clients; according to the release notes for version 1.5.658.56, this reduced the size of the download to 323 kilobytes. The full download for Vivaldi 1.5.658.56 is 38.5 megabytes.
The update itself includes a few minor bug fixes, none related to security.
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