About 10 years ago, I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The internet has gone through some changes since then, but, I stuck with Firefox as my primary browser for the past 10 years. However, there is a new kid on the block, Vivaldi. It's an interesting little project to be sure, with the old slogan, a modern classic, saying more than I possibly could about it's goals (for whatever reason, they decided a browser for our friends is a better slogan, and it has since been changed). In short, Vivaldi aims to put the user back in control over their browser; let the user decide how things should be configured, not the developer.

And that is Vivaldi's main strength: customization. Just about every aspect of operation can be tweaked and changed to suit the user's preference. Do you want tabs on the left side of the window, or even the bottom? Done! Do you want to have a modern, condensed title-bar, or do you want the classic file menu, or none at all? All of those are options! The customization doesn't stop there, however. One of the more useful aspects of browsing are keyboard shortcuts, and Vivaldi gives the user to rebind all of them, and even has some very useful and uncommon ones. For example, I have ctrl+(0-9) set to swtich to that number tab, and, alt+1/alt+2 set to move backward and forward in the tab-bar respectuflly. I have changed my numpad into a very usefl tool for managing my browser.

One last useful thing that Vivaldi offers is lots of features which most broswers have just as addons. My personal favorite is the built in tab-tiling feature, which lets the user split the screen to display multiple tabs at once in the same window. Another notable feature is the inclusion of filters, which change the way the page is displyed in various ways. There's a readability filter, which removes all images and formats the text to be very visible, useful for long articles. There's a filter to change the page into black-and-white, which is useful for designing colorschemes for the web to simulate poor color-vision, and many others!

Finally, Vivaldi is built around the webkit rendering engine, and incorperates a lot of chromimum into its code. This makes it pretty much a stand-in for chrome as far as most websites are concerned, and, just about all chrome extensions work without any issues.

Overall, I've been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for five months now, and I'm not looking back. I've enjoyed my time with it, and I really enjoy the flexibility that it offers. In the coming days, I plan to outline some of the more intersting and useful features in more detail.