Hands-on with Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users

It's been a long time since a brand new desktop browser landed on the Web. Web newcomers might even be forgiven for thinking that there have always been just four such browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

After the vicious early days when the world of Web browsers closely resembled the ruthless world of the railroad barons a century earlier, the browser market settled down to something pretty boring. First there was IE and Firefox. A few years later, Apple introduced Safari. Several years after that, Google launched Chrome. And since Chrome arrived in 2008, the Web hasn't seen another major browser launch—until now.

The browser is dead, long live the browser

Part of the reason no one seems to be building new browsers is that it's a massive undertaking. Another part, though, is likely due to the rise of mobile devices, which have spawned a thousand browsers that are all quietly, invisibly embedded into other applications.

Site-specific mobile applications like the Facebook or Twitter apps push the browser into the background. When you click a link in these apps, the pages just appear. Behind the scenes an embedded browser handles everything without switching to whatever dedicated browser might be installed on the device at hand. In fact, there's little need for a dedicated Web browser at all these days if you spend most of your time in mobile applications.

Desktop browsers have largely followed this overall trend of slipping into the background. Every new release sees them simplifying their interfaces and removing features that their data collection tools indicate are only used by a small handful. RSS icons disappear, toolbars get hidden away, the URL bar will likely disappear soon for many.

This ends up working out well for most, especially since, as Google infamously demonstrated some years ago, many people have no idea what a Web browser is or even that they're using one. The simpler the interface, the less the average user needs to think about anything other than what they want to see or do on the Web.

Given that success in the browser market is measured in market share, this is not surprising. The less sophisticated user will always be the most plentiful, and browsers will always chase the numbers.

That's not a bad thing, as it helps to get more people online. This approach improves the experience for the majority. Most people reading this have long since forgotten it, but there was a time when we, too, had no idea what all those inscrutable icons littered around the browser windows actually did.

There is, however, still that five percent that actually did use the RSS icon, liked their status bar, and will most likely abandon any browser that hides away the address bar. The power users may be the minority, but they still exist. Exactly what constitutes a power user is up for debate, but looking at the recent history of Web browser "advances" one thing seems clear, the power user is not the target audience. The person who wants to be in control of their experience and customize it to their liking has been left behind by most browsers.

Vivaldi: A new browser for power users

The power user's current solution to the simplification, arguably the infantilization, of the Web browser interface is to get all those missing features back with add-ons. This works to a degree, but it introduces a ton of extra code, some of it written by programmers far less capable than those contributing to the code of Firefox or Chromium. This inevitably means add-ons slow things down. The problem is bad enough that a future version of Firefox will even have a feature dedicated to letting you know which of your add-ons is slowing you down.

Savvy Ars readers know the list of major browsers at the start of this article was actually short one browser—Opera. Opera has never had a huge audience, but it did cater to power users. Then Opera decided to abandon its homegrown rendering engine and adopt WebKit (along with Chrome, Opera now uses the WebKit fork Blink). The move to WebKit meant more sites rendered properly in Opera (since supporting Opera's Presto engine was a low priority for most developers), but it also meant Opera had to leave behind some of the features that its power users relied on the most.

Even two years later. the current version of Opera still lacks most of the features targeted at power users: tab stacks, mouse gestures, extensive keyboard shortcuts, the ability to take notes on a webpage, and more. Modern day Opera is a shadow of its last Presto-based release (Opera 12).

Opera essentially threw in the towel on power users. That's at least partially why Vivaldi came to exist.

Vivaldi is a brand new Web browser that wants to bring back all the old features of Opera 12 and then some. The Vivaldi browser bills itself as "for our friends," which would seem to mean for power users. Vivaldi boasts many features the average user is unlikely to need or even be aware of. And after using the browser for a trial period, it's clear that this is indeed a power user's browser built by power users for power users. Put another way, this is the new (old) Opera.

The team behind Vivaldi recently released a second "technical preview." It's still experimental and a long way from finished, but you can try out Vivaldi today. Vivaldi works on Windows, OS X, and Linux (there are even .deb and .rpm downloads available for easy installation on Linux).

If you're a former Opera user unhappy with the direction of desktop Opera, we strongly suggest you download Vivaldi. The technical preview release may be rough around the edges, but it already supports tab stacking, adding notes (complete with screenshots of any page), mouse gestures, and tons of keyboard shortcuts. It's all wrapped in a user interface that's reminiscent of Opera 12.

It's no accident that Vivaldi offers most of what Opera 12 offered. Vivaldi's CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to rebuild the browser that Opera once was—the power user's browser.

Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, but of course this isn't the first time von Tetzchner has done it. Why do it again? The motivations behind Vivaldi are startlingly simple. As Von Tetzchner tells Ars, "Opera abandoned Opera... I thought, what am I going to do now? There were all these features that I was used to, that everyone else was used to and they were gone. So we thought, well there's a lot of people that want to do more with their browser, let's make a browser for them."

In other words Vivaldi isn't interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox, or Chrome. It's never going to get to that size user base. Instead, it will let you do more with the Web than any of the others will out of the box.

But Vivaldi may also have the potential to re-shape the browser market. Opera never had anything but a tiny slice of the market, but its impact on said market has been enormous. Just about every major feature in today's browsers started out in Opera: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pioneering support for Web standards, and even the clustered page thumbnails when you open a new window or tab (a feature known as "speed dial"). These all started in Opera and were then copied by Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and (sometimes) IE.