Vivaldi Browser 1.14 update released

Vivaldi 1.14 is out. The new version of the web browser features a vertical reader view and usability improvements for various built-in features.

Vivaldi Technologies AS launched the first preview version of the Vivaldi Browser three years ago in January 2015, and the first stable version in April 2016.

Vivaldi released a total of 14 stable versions of the web browser at that time introducing features such as theme scheduling, native screenshot capturing, animation controls, and a lot more.

Vivaldi Browser 1.14

Vivaldi's Reader View is an excellent feature. It improves the readability of articles on the Web by removing distracting elements such as navigational elements, menus, sidebar content or advertisement.

Reader View supported customization options for some time. Users may change font type and size, line height or column width, and switch between light and dark designs.

Vertical Reader View adds support for languages such as Japanese, Korean or Chinese (simplified and traditional) that may use a vertical display for written text. Vivaldi is the first web browser to support a vertical reading mode.

You can enable Vertical Reader View in the following way in Vivaldi 1.14:

1. Load vivaldi://settings/webpages/ in the browser's address bar. This displays the WebPages Settings page.
2. Scroll down to the Reader View section.
3. Check "Allow Vertical Text Direction."
4. Select the "vertical text" icon under Text Direction.

Note: This changes the default text direction for all languages. Vivaldi 1.14 has no options to assign the text direction to specific languages so that the text direction applies automatically based on a page's language. You may flip the text direction when in Reader View mode, however.

Notes with Markdown support

Vivaldi users may take notes using built-in functionality. Notes is a handy feature to write text notes, copy text from web pages, take screenshots, and attach files.

Notes supported plain text only up until now, but this changes with the release of Vivaldi 1.14. Notes support markdown as of the release which means that you may apply formatting to your notes.

To give you some examples:

• # adds a heading
• 1., 2. and 3. an ordered list
• * an unordered list
• ** text ** bold text
• * text * italic text
• - [ ] task list
• - [x] completed task

Check out GitHub's help page for additional commands.

Customize Web Panel positions

Vivaldi users may drag and drop websites to the sidebar to make them web panels. This opens a selected site in the sidebar area of the browser so that it may be accessed from there and without impacting the page of the active tab in the process.

You may rearrange the order of Web Panels in Vivaldi 1.14. Use drag and drop to move any site pinned as a Web Panel in the browser to another location.

Note that the order of built-in panels is fixed and that you may only change the order of Web Panels.

Reorder Search Engines

You may change the order of search engines similarly to how you can change the order of Web Panels in Vivaldi 1.14.

Open the Search settings (vivaldi://settings/search/) and drag & drop search engines around on the page that opens.

A click on the down arrow icon next in the browser's search toolbar displays the search engines in the selected order.

Tip: use keywords, e.g., b search term or s search term in the address bar to run searches using specific search engines.

Closing Words

Vivaldi 1.14 may not reinvent the wheel but it introduces new or improved features that will certainly appeal to part of the browser's userbase. I'm particularly excited about markdown support as it makes note taking that more powerful in the browser. (via gHacks)

Now You: Have you tried Vivaldi recently? What's your take on the new version?