OSLO – NOVEMBER 22ND, 2016 – Vivaldi releases its latest version 1.5 today accelerating its pace to create a user-centric web browser. Vivaldi gives you a unique ability – a first for browsers – to control the color of smart-home lighting through browsing. Additionally, this release offers a lot of improvements over previous versions, including being able to drag tabs, tab stacks and tab selections between windows. Significant highlights also include delta updates, reader mode button and automatic screen shots in notes. Download Vivaldi 1.5 today from vivaldi.com.
Vivaldi’s Light Bulb Moment
Vivaldi treads an adventurous route, going beyond the browser and into the smart home by integrating with Hue color lights from Philips. After enabling Hue in Vivaldi Theme Settings, a tap on the Philips Hue Bridge confirms the connection. Selecting which lights Vivaldi should control, the browser will synchronize your physical surroundings with the color of the web.
With this light bulb moment, Vivaldi opens the door for new opportunities for seamless integration between the browser and physical space.
“This is just a first step for us but imagine a world where you get notified for a new email or web notification through a light bulb,” explains CEO Jon von Tetzchner. “Vivaldi is all about customisation and flexibility. Integrating with IoT devices like Philips Hue makes it possible for Vivaldi to adapt to you and your everyday life.”
Worth the wait
Vivaldi is all about striving to take things to the next level. Thus, when implementing tab dragging, which was highly requested by our users, we also added the capability to drag tab stacks and tab selections, making it even faster to move tabs between windows.
With this implementation, Vivaldi’s most bankable feature of tab stacking encourages easy facilitation when you have way too many tabs open. Tab Stacking lets you create ‘folders’ of tabs. Just drag one tab on top of another and you’ve got yourself a tab stack.
Reader View more accessible
Along with performance improvements, accessibility of content according to your reading preferences has also been enhanced. We take the reader view settings a notch up by adding a reader mode button to the address bar. The reader mode button allows you to remove the clutter for better readability.
Slow connections? No worries
Vivaldi now offers delta updates for Windows versions as of now, which means only the changes from release to release are downloaded, rather than the entire binary. This results in a smaller download that transfers faster, which is great for users with slow connections.
Automatic screenshots in Notes
Innumerable options of customization means Vivaldi is designed to your exact needs and preferences, thus making the very useful feature of taking notes alongside the web pages even better. If you add a note from selected text on a web page, the note will automatically include a screenshot of the page. This is on by default and can be turned off in the settings.
“We want our browser to be intelligent and create new experiences and services.”said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Vivaldi Technologies. “Thinking beyond a browser and entering the real world is not only adventurous but also encourages the spirit of innovation and experimentation. We are open to new ‘out of the box’ ideas that make your browsing experience more creative and pleasurable. Ideas from our users and continuous implementations of those ideas only strengthen our relationship with them.”