After Mozilla’s wrongheaded announcement that they are giving up their whole plug in architecture for Chrome Style plug ins, I had been up in the air about what browser I want to use in the future. Sure Chrome is fast, but I hate that it is Google and everything you do is basically going through Google, which is the second reason I prefer Firefox, and though it was time to try some other options. Now I don’t like Safari much even with it’s newer features, and I never was a big Opera fan, especially of late, but on that count there is something newer, Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is a new browser from one of the founders of Opera that focuses on Power User features and customization and it has built in Tree Style Plug ins.
As you can see, Tree Style Tabs are on the left or right so they don’t take up precious vertical browsing space. I used to always use Tab Mix Plus to have multiple tab rows, but that takes up a lot of your vertical browsing space, and Tree Style seems a much more elegant solution on todays computers with wide screen displays.
So far it is a pretty impressive browser. It will import your Firefox Bookmarks, though it’s drag and drop bookmarks feature seems a little funky as it seems to reverse order of dragged folders. It has Sync across computings (or will soon), an adaptive interface that changes color based on the site you are on, it will have an e-mail client built in, and it is very fast.
It uses Opera and Chrome style plug ins, but only a handful are implemented as of yet, but this is a technology preview after all.
So far I am pretty impressed, and plan on continuing to use it, and when Firefox loses all the plug ins that I love, I just might have a replacement that is pretty darn good.