Back in 1995, when I got access to the Internet for the first time, the dominant web browser was Netscape Navigator. While it had its flaws, its main audience were power-users, much because only power-users had Internet access at that time. It had its flaws, and in 1996 I found a small Norwegian browser called Opera. I came in at version 2.12, one of the first public releases, and was hooked from day one.

I continued to use Opera for quite some time, especially while working for the company that made it for over ten years (first from 2000 to 2007, and then again from 2009 to 2012). During this time, Opera was the choice for power-users, but this all changed when they switched rendering engines in 2013 (which was also the reason for me leaving the company at that time). I was happy with the decision to switch engines, as Presto did have some architectural issues that were different to overcome, what I didn’t like was how they killed off almost all the power-user featured creating a “simple” browser.

There are enough of the simple browsers. I use them from time to time, like Google Chrome, which still feels like I’m waiting for it to become a proper browser with a proper UI (and it’s up to version 40-something already), like Firefox, which keeps losing UI elements for each new release, and like the new Opera, which fortunately did get bookmarks back recently. I have not really tested the new Opera that much, and I must confess I am still using Opera 12 as my main browser, despite it starting to show its age.

Enter Vivaldi. Established by one of the two co-founders of Opera Software, Vivaldi started out with a community, to coincide with Opera Software shutting down their My Opera community. Recently, they also announced availability of the Vivaldi Browser, a new browser targeted at power-users. Like the new Opera, it is based on Chromium, the open-source engine of Google Chrome, but unlike Opera, Vivaldi is trying to create a browsing experience like the old Opera browser did. I was happy to be invited to beta test it a couple of months before the release of the first technical preview, and while it still has some issues to work out, it is coming close to becoming my first choice in browsers (I just need to replace the e-mail client, IRC client and RSS aggregator part of Opera before letting it go completely).

Configurability, customizability and ease of use all in one.  There’s no contradiction in doing it all at once. And since it is based on the Chromium engine, sites that are coded to work with Google Chrome just work as expected.

If you haven’t already, you should give it a try!