Opera co-founder creates Vivaldi browser; packs in nifty features that could boost productivity

You tend to think the PC segment is stagnating. There’s hardly anything new happening there, when Vivaldi surfaces. Although it’s been around for a while, with the version 1.0 of the browser now out, you could just turn ultra productive! The team behind Vivaldi Opera has been a popular browser in India since the days of J2ME phones that allowed users to browse through heavy websites by way of the superior compression and content delivery features. Opera co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, and Tatsuki Tomita came together to found Vivaldi. The idea behind Vivaldi is to create a browser that would be used by  heavy internet users, and those who had adopted Opera as their browser of choice. After launching the first beta in November, Vivaldi is now ready with version 1.0 of its browser. The browser does manage to pack in a long list of features that help with productivity. The features that caught my attention are below: Stacked tabs Among my favourite feature in Vivaldi is stacked tabs. Now I could club all my leisure activities such as Facebook and Twitter into one stack. All other work-related tabs such as email, research tabs and spreadsheets could be stacked into another. [caption id=“attachment_307697” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] On the top left, the tech2 and Firstpost pages are stacked into one tab. Similarly, Twitter and Facebook are stacked together.[/caption] Tab preview If you’re someone like me, who loves browsing, you probably have dozens (if not more) tabs open on your browser at any given point in time. What makes it difficult is how you find the appropriate tab to switch to when you leave a task mid way. With tab preview, you don’t bother much. Simply hover your mouse over the tabs and a rich preview of the page is made available. [caption id=“attachment_307709” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Tab preview adds the much needed convenience while browsing through dozens of pages.[/caption] Page panels This page is probably more useful to website testers and developers. Page panels allows you to simulate the webpage simultaneously across a desktop browser as well as a mobile screen. In the image below, the tech2 page is rendered using Vivaldi for desktop on the right, and the mobile site is on the left. You could modify the width of the mobile site to get a feel of larger screen sizes as well. [caption id=“attachment_307710” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Mobile and desktop rendering simultaneously never got easier.[/caption] Page notes In a way Page notes implements note taking features found in services such as Evernote. However, what you would have is a bunch of notes you take, or text you copy from a webpage. Simply click on the Notes icon on the panel on the left. Select text on the webpage you are interested in. Right-click on it to save it as a note. This saves the text you copied as well as the URL of the page for ready reference anytime in the future. [caption id=“attachment_307716” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] If you’re using Vivaldi, you probably won’t need Evernote again.[/caption] Keyboard gestures Although keyboard shortcuts isn’t a new feature, power users love it a lot. And if you’re one, you’ll love it too. If you head over to Settings, you can also assign keyboard shortcuts to your favourite operations. Vivaldi offers you the ability to customise the shortcuts. Page zoom Another interesting feature is the ability to zoom in a webpage to an extent that you get a better view of UI elements. This is handy for designers. However, Chrome seems to do a better job by allowing a page to be zoomed by up to 500%.