Help to enable search suggestions, better Mail previews – Vivaldi Browser snapshot 3381.3

Search suggestions – your choice

Search suggestions remain off by default but now we make it easier to enable them.

Some six years back I wrote a blog post about why search suggestions in the Vivaldi address bar were off by default. In short, the problem is that with them enabled, everything you type is sent to the search engine (even if you never search), allowing them to potentially know an awful lot about you and your interests. However, on the flip side these live suggestions are highly convenient often allowing you to get the right link right from the get go.

Having suggestions off by default feels right from privacy perspective but users who might want this for convenience, probably wouldn’t find it. In this snapshot we now ask new users if they want to flip this setting, right in the address field. This makes the setting discoverable and gives us a little space to explain why it is off in the first place.

For now it will only prompt when using search engines that have a suitable suggests URL configured in settings. We will be adding more suggests URLs in the future, so that it works with more of our bundled search engines.

Downloading email for offline searching and viewing

From this snapshot our new default is to always fully download the last 30 days of email and also completely fetch all messages on screen. However, as always we also offer additional settings.

Previously emails were not “prefetched” unless you manually enabled this during setup (or later in settings), so you would only have the full mail body for those mails you specifically clicked on. This default was set because those with big accounts might find the initial setup quite time consuming. However mail obviously works best when you have full, local copies of as many emails as possible. That allows you to search, not just in mails you have read but also those that you have not read. In addition, our new message preview feature can only work if you have some mail content. So we are changing our default.

Download (3381.3)

• Windows
  • Win10+ 64-bit
  • Win10+ 32-bit
  • Win10+ ARM64 ^⚠️
• macOS
  • 10.15+ Universal
• Linux
  • DEB 64-bit | RPM 64-bit
  • DEB ARM64 | RPM ARM64
  • DEB ARM | RPM ARM
  • non-DEB/RPM ^[help]

Changelog

• [New][Address bar] Ask new users if they want to enable search suggest (VB-105510)
• [Address bar] Refactor the Switch Tab behavior (VB-106901)
• [Address bar] Search field item missing padding (VB-107186)
• [Address bar] Switch URL and Title position (VB-106883)
• [Address bar] Undo command fails when undo to a completion (VB-105826)
• [Address bar][Search] Don’t display search engine nickname in dropdown (VB-107102)
• [Blocker] Number in blocker dialog breaks to 2 lines (VB-106625)
• [Bookmarks] Bookmarking trashed items does not work in windows panel (VB-106971)
• [Break Mode][Privacy] Obscure more parts of the UI (VB-106952)
• [Calendar] Add the possibility to search in panel (VB-104632)
• [Calendar] Panel auto closes when clicking in date picker dropdown (VB-106987)
• [Chromium] Upgraded to 126.0.6478.33
• [Crash][Settings] Opening privacy settings (VB-106321)
• [History][Performance] Items with very long URLs cause slow down (VB-107119)
• [Keyboard][Windows] Alt+F4 no longer works to close the application when site is opened (VB-106969)
• [Languages] Add Georgian and Sinhala languages (VB-106941)
• [Linux] Update appdata.xml with newer images and more information
• [macOS] Provide haptic feedback for drag and drop actions (VB-107066)
• [macOS] Update Sparkle to 2.6.3 (VB-106557)
• [macOS] Upgrade the Sparkle update framework (VB-106557)
• [macOS][Menus] Cannot select sub-menus from the global menu bar when periodic reloading is enabled (VB-92519)
• [Mail] “Start Search Using Enter Key” setting not working in menu (VB-106906)
• [Mail] Download mails faster and download newest mails first (VB-99073)
• [Mail] Improve display of mail composed with Apple Mail (VB-34557)
• [Mail] Message opened in tab does not have focus (VB-35697)
• [Mail] Quick replies inserted above quoted original document (VB-106676)
• [Mail] Sent plain text preview wrapped in HTML tags (VB-107064)
• [Mail] TypeError when searching in emails (VB-106424)
• [Mail][Calendar] oAuth popup dialog keeps showing (VB-107077)
• [Mail][Feeds] Panels stuck infinitely loading after db fault (VB-106920)
• [Mail][Settings] Prefetch a month and visible messages by default and provide additional settings (VB-29572)
• [Panels] Closed tabs’ context menu broken in Windows Panel (VB-106967)
• [Quick Commands] Show tip on first use (VB-106904)
• [Search] Add Suggest URLs for Google and Yahoo: curently only for unchanged search settings (VB-106786)
• [Security] Issue which could allow code execution when dragging unexpected objects (VB-107026)
• [Settings] Clicking on “Reset Global Permissions” button causes an immediate crash (VB-107121)
• [Settings] Wrong date and time format settings (VB-106591)
• [Settings][Gestures] Can not add custom gesture (VB-106939)
• [Speed Dial] Drag’n’drop feels weird (VB-102372)
• [Sync] Conflict after reset (VB-107056)
• [Tabs] Alt+click on the close button in a stack behaves unexpectedly (VB-106968)
• [Tabs] Compact stacks broken in horizontal scrolling tab bar (VB-99751)
• [Tabs][Periodic Reload] Improve performance (VB-107027)
• [Tabs][Settings] New tab does not open at the end of the tab bar with some configurations (VB-107104)
• [Welcome] Add an option to import installed Chrome extensions (VB-105945)
• [Workspaces][Menus] Cannot see other windows/workspaces or their tabs in the window menu (VB-93560)
• [Workspaces][Tabs] Moving a tab to another window changes workspaces (VB-106776)

Main photo by Andrzej Gdula.