Vivaldi web browser
Les Pounder loves the science of statistics and now he’s found the ideal browser to monitor how many times he’s searched for pies and Pis…
Les Pounder loves stats and has found a way to monitor how many times he searches for pies.
What’s this, a web browser for the Raspberry Pi? Does it need another one? Well to be frank, yes. For the first few years of the Raspbian desktop, we used the Epiphany browser. While this is a capable browser and well suited to the meagre resources of the Pi, it just wasn’t much fun.
Over the past two years we’ve seen Chromium appear as the new default browser. It does a good job of balancing the needs of the user with the available resources, and controversially it saw the inclusion of Flash on the Pi. But when Vivaldi was recently announced with claims that it was a better browser, we had to take a look.
First of all, this is an experimental browser based upon Chromium that’s been optimised so the user can adapt the browser to their needs. The most obvious example of this is page tiling, where multiple tabs can be kept open in the same window. This is handy for checking multiple sources of information on one screen. Tabs can also be pinned and grouped to keep the user interface clear and easy to use.
Indeed, we were pleased by what the browser’s interface had to offer. Its default configuration has the standard address bar and navigation icons at the top of the screen, with a search box (the default option is Bing but this can be easily changed) ready to search for queries. To the left of the window are quick links to Bookmarks, Downloads and a neat option to make notes on web pages: this can also be done by highlighting any text on a page and clicking the right mouse button. It records the page and time of the note – very handy for educational reference.
Stats the way to do it
The History icon opens the browsing history and also shows how many times a page has been viewed. By clicking the Vivaldi icon in the top left and selecting Tools>History we can see a more detailed analysis of browsing history, which includes a breakdown of the top domains that have been visited, how domains are found (type in the URL, click a link and so on) and a graph showing the times at which we browsed, giving us a clear picture of our browsing habits. Fans of statistics ( hello!-Ed) are going to love that!
At the bottom of the window is an option to take a screenshot. When we tested this it took rather a long time to render the image. To our surprise we found that Vivaldi had rendered the entire web page into one rather tall image. This feature is interesting as screenshots can be viewed offline later.
Another feature available at the bottom of the window is the Page Options. This enables you to alter the web page, block content, and render the page in black and white or with a sepia tone. The options also extend to 3D transforms and skewed images, but we’re unsure how this feature can be applied effectively.
But what about the more Raspberry Pi-centric features? Well, even the mighty Pi 3 struggles with web content, particularly animated GIFs, so in the settings these can be turned off, while a “reader” mode enables you to focus on text content. We tried the browser with YouTube and while it played content, it was far from smooth.
Vivaldi is a great alternative to Chromium. It enables users to adapt the browser to their needs and it has great tools to extend the use of the browser. This may be an option of Pi 3, but for those on Pi 2 or older, stick with what you already use for now.