A browser for people who think Chrome is for dummies - CNET

Ever since Google launched Chrome in 2008, Web browsers embraced spartan interfaces that stripped out toolbars, menus and anything else that got in the way of viewing a website.

Simplicity is swell. But Tuesday night, a new browser arrived from Oslo, Norway, that caters to power users who don't want to see everything pared away.

Vivaldi 1.0 is stuffed with options to get the browser working just as you like, even as it tries to preserve a tidy interface. Vivaldi programmers will respond fast to new feature requests, said Jon von Tetzchner, Vivaldi's chief executive and the co-founder of Opera Software, one of the earliest browser makers.

"If a person is asking for it, we will bend over backwards to put it in there," said von Tetzchner, who hired most of his staff from Oslo, Norway rival Opera.

It's a great time to be a browser user. Chrome dominates, but most of Google's project is open-source software that anyone can use for free. That's just what Opera, Yandex, Brave, Baidu and Vivaldi have done to try to lure new users -- in Vivaldi's case, with its full-featured approach.

Vivaldi 1.0, a browser designed for power...

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Some Vivaldi abilities:

• Position tabs on top, bottom, left or right.
• Tidy up tabs into groups called tab stacks.
• Save groups of tabs you'll need again as a session.
• Use keyboard commands in the address bar to pick a particular search engine. Type "d panama papers" to search at Duck Duck Go, for example.
• Fine-tune Vivaldi with its own options or use almost any Chrome extensions for further customization.

Vivaldi is for Windows, OS X and Linux computers, but the 35-employee company plans a mobile version, too, von Tetzchner said.

That'll be important since phones are a major part of life online. On phones, we tend to use special-purpose apps, not Web browsers, to check Facebook and play Monument Valley. Von Tetzchner hopes browsers will see a renaissance, with Web apps pushing many native apps aside on phones as they did last decade on Windows and OS X.

"There's a reason why we moved away from apps onto the Web," he said. "Reversing that is not anything we'd like."