Recently on March 17, 2021, Vivaldi Technologies released stable version 3.7 of Vivaldi, perhaps my most awaited version ever. It introduced many welcome additions including notable responsive and performance improvements, more customizable context menus, quick commands improvements, and the start of silent updates.
Specifically, customizable webpage context menus definitely are the feature that I have been looking forward to the most as many others have also. I looked forward to them enough that I installed standalone versions of Vivaldi’s snapshot on my personal and work computers mostly to start trying them before they reached the stable channel. I had done this on my personal computer around when the Vivaldi team was starting to customize menus across the browser only to quickly realize that they would need much more time to have the webpage context menu customization available. That was around a half-year ago. As I was continuing to follow the blog posts, they confirmed the feature’s availability in the snapshot channel on February 17 in a post appropriately titled, “It’s about time — Vivaldi Browser snapshot (3.7.)2202.3.” I excitedly read through the post and many comments and quickly updated the snapshot installation on my personal computer.
After the browser updated and restarted, I believe I ran my habitual test of loading a webpage, opening the developer tools, and reloading through the webpage right-click context menu. As expected, Vivaldi’s user interface, not the webpage, reloaded, the developer tools closed, and the browser started to become erratic. I immediately fixed this by loading a new tab and tiling it with the previous one, and next, I untiled them to focus on only the first tab once more.
With a little apprehension, I opened Vivaldi’s appearance settings, saw that the webpage context menus were indeed there, and searched for the reload options. A few forum posters and I have known that the “Reload” option specifically is problematic. For comparison, the “Forward” and “Back” options, etc. have been okay and don’t cause this issue. I also knew that if there was going to be a good way of resolving this until the developers and QA testers could fix that option itself, there would need to be a user-controllable workaround. The search in the settings returned a few options, one of them being “Reload Page”. I started to feel relieved and ecstatic as I realized that the main issue that I have had with Vivaldi as a browser was about to end. I immediately replaced “Reload” with “Reload Page” and went to restart my habitual test. As I was thinking then, the Vivaldi team also has to be commended for allowing these options to be changed without needing to first update the browser.
I restarted the test, and with the developer tools open, the webpage, not Vivaldi’s UI, reloaded. While still existing, the related bug that had troubled me for over a year had a proper workaround. A few more quick tests reaffirmed what I knew.
Irrespective of the potential instability of the snapshot channel, I installed a standalone copy on my work computer on the following workday, tried a few quick tests, and had another moment of bliss. It had been hours since I first realized that my high productivity with Vivaldi was going to increase further.
No longer would I really need to stop my workflow in Vivaldi, restart it in one or more browsers to have to do some validations through its developer tools, and jarringly go back and forth between them. Trying to continue using only Vivaldi, working with its developer tools, and then having to remember to go against muscle memory of using the webpage context menu to reload so that my network and console logs didn’t disappear was always saddening.
Yes, there were other bugs and quirks that were troubling also, including with some parts of the developer tools themselves, but this was the only one that broke my productivity when using Vivaldi at work. The known bug, probably known in the tracker as bug number VB-56590, is considered as a regression. It wasn’t always there in the browser, and I recall times where I could reload through that way. Disappointed, I had to use other browsers to do my testing, and my productivity fell because I had to manage two or more browsers and not always be able to use Vivaldi’s other amazing productivity features such as tab tiling, quick commands, and various link opening options. An implementation at least similar to Vivaldi’s tab tiling, another personal, must-have feature, just does not exist in other mainstream browsers regardless of whether they are built-in or available through extensions.
I cannot understate that this workaround helped my workflow enough that since I’ve received and started using my newer work computer, I have only manually installed Vivaldi Stable and Snapshot for the web browsers so far and have used either Vivaldi version 99% of the time when using a web browser. With the release of 3.7 to the stable channel on March 17, I’ve been using that channel as my default browser for work again. The improvements to its performance, which I’d noticed before was less than other browsers but definitely not enough to keep me from using it, are a great bonus. It’s definitely not perfect. No browser is. Even so, after years of wanting to have a browser that I can use for 95% or more of my personal and work tasks, Vivaldi has become that for me.
