The release of Vivaldi for Linux ARM, including the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Contest dominated December on the Vivaldi forum and it was an immense pleasure to see how much our work on this experimental build resonated with the community. The two blog posts were read more than 20,000 times last month alone.
Positive comments like this one by @Gwen-Dragon sum up the sentiment:
“Wow. Vivaldi on RasPi. Good work.”
The excitement of the community could be felt even more through the competition entries we got. You submitted some incredible ideas that demonstrated both enthusiasm and knowledge. We hope you believe us when we say that it was an incredibly tough job picking the five winners from over 200 entries.
In competition mode
Right before the holidays, we challenged you again. This time to win a trip to Oslo to meet the Vivaldi team! This blog post has been viewed close to 9,000 times and we’ve already seen some competition entries that make us happy and extremely proud of our products and the community we’ve built. The competition is open until this coming Sunday, 7th January, so still not too late to take part. Here’s how.
Wanna meet us in Oslo? Tell us what Vivaldi means to you. What are the features you can’t live without? How does Vivaldi help you work smarter? Or maybe you’ve customized Vivaldi in a way that will surprise us? In short, show us your Vivaldi in action! We look forward to welcoming one of you to Oslo in 2018!
Happy Holidays and Thank You
As 2017 drew to a close, Jon von Tetzchner reflected on all that had happened during the year. In Happy Holidays and Thank You he wrote:
“The years of patiently working on building a personal and flexible browser with all of you have helped us reach this far. I am grateful for the amazing work our Vivaldi team, Sopranos, translators, volunteers, and supporters have accomplished.”
It was reassuring to read your comments under Jon’s blog.
“Thanks for all the great work you’ve done this year! I think you made more progress this year than you have in all previous years,” @D0J0P said.
“Cheers! Amazing to see Vivaldi come a long way, and it has been getting a lot of press in some of the tech sites,” @Chas4 wrote.
“This browser has definitely come in to rescue at the right time in 2017 and packs a good bit of power browsing features and customization, where all other browsers have either dropped the ball sadly, or never had it to begin with and have no intention of doing better. So I look forward to see what you do in 2018 with the browser. I also don’t see the malevolence of Google et al Microsoft stopping to undermine and abuse the trust of end users in there general practices. So keep it up on the awareness front for things that are going on,” @Koolio posted.
A taste of things to come
The Snapshot blog post on Movable Web Panels (Snapshot 1.14.1038.3) was read more than 10,000 times in December and judging by the comments, you are excited about the possibilities this new feature is bringing to the browser.
“We have been looking at your recent feature requests for 1.14 and picked out one of the requests with the highest number of upvotes, an option to reorder websites that are in Web Panel. So for today’s Snapshot we implemented exactly that!” wrote @ruario on the blog.
“Amazing work team Vivaldi! Thank you so much for always listening to the community!” commented @JuniorSilva30 who originally requested the feature on the Feature Request thread.
“Can’t tell you how much this finally transforms the attraction of the Web Panels. Very nice feature before, but just outstanding now,” added @Steffie.
Searching, always searching
Our blog post How to get the most out of search engines in Vivaldi created one of the most lively discussions last month and got close to 6,000 views. What do you know about search engines in Vivaldi and are you putting them to good use, we asked. What we got – some great feedback and a kick in the back.
“Please fix the regression (deliberate change?) that sorts the search engines on the context menu, bringing the most recently used to the top of the list. I carefully sorted my search engines in Alphabetical order, and don’t want them to keep changing. It is not ergonomic, especially if users have dozens of search engines. In my case, it’s just a minor irritation to have to stop and read the menu, instead of relying on muscle memory,” @Pesala posted.
“After encouragement by your colleague @Pettern (in this thread a few months ago) I filed a bug report/feature request for this weird behavior and another one to add the option to always open context searches in background tabs. To change the ranking of the searches after each search is very unintuitive and slows down the workflow significantly because you have to actively look for the desired search engine every single time. I was told it would be a quick and simple fix,” @Bubibalboa added.
Rest assured that changes are in the pipeline and we hope to resolve some of the issues you brought up soon.
From one user to another
In an automatic logo thumbnail fetcher and changer for Vivaldi’s Speed Dial @gotham13121997 posted a python script he’d created to fetch and change the thumbnails of the speed dial with the logo of the domains. He posted the script on the forum inviting other Vivaldi users to try it out.
“Thank you for sharing this!!” @Taravasya said.
“That’s a good idea, I just don’t wanna try it because my speed dial thumbnails are all custom,” commented @Luetage.
Did we miss something important in December? Let us know in the comments!
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
