Vivaldi is a relatively new web browser that’s the spiritual successor to Opera. The browser is beginning to gain market share as it becomes better known. It’s focused on letting you customise every aspect of its operation, providing advanced features that you won’t find elsewhere.
“Make History”
Today, Vivaldi reached version 1.8, a milestone release that the company says will “make history.” The browser’s History pane has been completely overhauled to make its contents more accessible and useful. You’re no longer constrained to a simple list of URLs and page titles. Instead, Vivaldi will do everything it can to help you track down the identity of a page you need to revisit, introducing a new history interface in the process.
Vivaldi
Vivaldi
The feature is based around a full-screen history browser that augments the traditional list view by adding a calendar interface. Your visits are placed onto the calendar, letting you quickly scan through days and work out when you might have visited a site. If you need to dive deeper, you can customise the view to your needs and access heat-maps to show how often you visit certain pages.
Vivaldi will also offer insights into your browsing patterns. It provides detailed statistics about your previously visited sites, including an index of your recent browsing history, a list of your most-visited domains and analysis of how you navigate to different pages. The information is presented in colourful charts and graphs that make it accessible while maintaining its depth.
“More useful than ever before”
Vivaldi
Vivaldi
“We want to make browsing history more useful than ever before,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO at Vivaldi Technologies. “Instead of having to scroll through hundreds of lines, Vivaldi gives a comprehensive overview of history, presented in a visual way. This lets our users analyze their online activity and helps them find what they are looking for.”
The raft of data presented by Vivaldi may alarm privacy-conscious users. However, the company said everything stays on your computer and is never stored on a server. You can delete items from history individually, by site or by timeframe.
Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner
Vivaldi
CEO von Tetzchner noted that cybercriminals could extract the patterns exposed by Vivaldi from any browser’s history data. Vivaldi simply goes the extra mile to make it accessible to users, making people aware of what their browsing history can reveal.
“The new History feature shows the kind of data that could be tracked by third parties,” said von Tetzchner. “Instead of trying to monetize our users’ browsing patterns, we are giving them this data – for their eyes only.”
Available today
Vivaldi
Vivaldi
Vivaldi’s new History feature could be the start of a new trend amongst web browsers. By making the information stored in browsing history visible to users, people could be made more privacy-conscious while also enjoying the benefits of the improved menu.
Alongside History, Vivaldi 1.8 also ships with several other new features, including an expanded notes pane, improved tab muting controls and the ability to set the browser’s home page to the Start screen. It’s available from today via Vivaldi’s website.
