A tailor-made browser

Vivaldi provides users with much-needed control

Tired of looking at the annoying pop-ups or unnecessary RSS feeds on your computer screen? Your troublesome days are here to end with the all new Vivaldi - a web browser tailor-made to suit your needs and demands.

The brain behind the browser is of Jon S von Tetzchner. Yes, you heard it right. The same guy who was the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Opera and the mastermind behind its success.

While popular offerings such as the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox intrude with the working of the browser by removing features (RSS buttons, toolbars, protocols in the address bar), but with Vivaldi, this decision solely rests in the hands of the user. It's defaults are close to that of what Chrome and Firefox use, however, almost it's entire interface and behaviour can be customised to your whims and fancies.

For instance, the browser has the option to hide the protocol (https://, ftp://, etc) in the address bar. You can head back to the settings, and one can find a little box that says "show full URL". Enable it, and you'll get your URL back.

When you first open up Vivaldi, it looks like any other browser. The default user interface (UI) layout is not that cluttered with buttons. In fact, one has to dig into the preferences pane to discover the browser's real power.

After installing Vivaldi, (which includes importing your settings and bookmarks from your old browser) the first place to head is the preference panel. Here you find a plethora of customisation options. You can customise keyboard shortcuts, set up multi-touch gestures, show or hide all the toolbars and sidebar, even hide the entire UI if you wish. You can even set up a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle the UI elements when you need them and hide them when you're reading.

For the 1.0 version, Vivaldi surely pack a knockout punch. Go ahead and explore it.