Today, Vivaldi launched a new version of its browser, Vivaldi 6.1, that’s available across Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, tablets, and Chromebooks. The update features a ton of new features as well as improvements. Here’s everything you need to know:
Just like most browsers, Vivaldi is powered by the Chromium open-source project and works perfectly across most sites. However, there have been instances where some users have reported being blocked out from accessing certain websites. The first account dates back to 2019, which prompted Vivaldi to incorporate the web browser’s name, the operating system’s name, and other technical information into its User-Agent strings.
The second account took place this year when the browser started using the new Client Hints standard. Yngve Pettersen, Vivaldi’s developer, further detailed how User-Agent discrimination works:
It’s not only websites that discriminate based on your name. Vivaldi now masquerades as Google Chrome for graphic card drivers, which unlocks graphic card driver optimizations made specifically for Chrome. By pretending to be Chrome, the GPU user uses less memory and resources. It improves battery life, reduces crashes, and improves system stability.
Vivaldi further details that finding workarounds to bypass these issues also opened up new opportunities for users to leverage in a bid to enhance their browsing experience. For instance, on this new version, users will be able to access Bing Chat.
Bing Chat has been available to users for close to four months now. And while Microsoft expanded its availability to more users recently by shipping it to open preview for everyone to try it out, the chatbot is still limited to the Edge browser.
Aside from releasing the chatbot to open preview, you’ll no longer be required to have a Microsoft Account to access it. However, your interactions with the tool will be limited. All these are great steps designed to get more users to interact with the chatbot. However, it’s still limited to Microsoft Edge.
According to the blog post:
Vivaldi masquerades as Microsoft Edge when visiting Bing. This means that you can access Bing Chat using Vivaldi on desktop and Android devices.
The new update is also enhancing the Workspaces feature on the desktop client. The feature is designed to help users with better tab management. Vivaldi has highlighted that users will now be able to navigate between different sets of tabs easily while keeping the tab bar less cluttered. You can also reorder your tabs based on your preference and level of importance.
Additionally, Vivaldi is also making it easier for users to share links, thus making the flow of work easier. “On desktop, you can now select tabs and copy links to all the selected pages,” the company indicated in the blog.
And finally, the company has announced that the browser will be available on iOS soon. It’s already in preview on iOS and iPads and should be rolling out to more users soon.
