Vivaldi has launched a new web browser that is different enough to have a chance of success. Rather than targeting the mass market with a simplified browser, Vivaldi is trying to deliver more power to the people who live and work on the web, whether they use Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

These people, the developers believe, are those who want to take notes and screen grabs while browsing, or view three or four different web pages in the same tab. People who want to be able to save and reload all their favourite sites as sessions. People who want to do everything via configurable keyboard commands, or use mouse-gestures instead.

Vivaldi co-founder Jon von Tetzchner. Photograph: Publicity image

In other words, Vivaldi is a browser for “power users”, geeks and techno-freaks, though there’s nothing to stop anybody else from using it. In its standard configuration, it’s a straightforward replacement for Google’s Chrome. Although Vivaldi’s interface is new, the engine underneath is open source Chromium – the same code that powers Google’s browser.

Vivaldi’s co-founder and chief executive, Jón von Tetzchner, says he has been “giving you a better browser since 1994”, referring to Opera – another cutting-edge browser created by Tetzchner and christened with a music-related name. When he left in 2011, the company had 740 employees and more than 200 million users. However, he didn’t like the direction Opera was going – towards “a limited, simplified browser,” he says – and he didn’t like dealing with outside investors.

The new browser running on laptops. Photograph: Publicity image

A couple of years later, Tetzchner started Vivaldi to solve both problems. As the sole financier, he says “we have no investors and their agendas to dictate our progress. There’s no exit strategy and we’re here to stay. All we want to do is give people a browser they’re proud to use and that we’re proud to call Vivaldi.”

Since Vivaldi has a full time staff and has offices in Norway, Iceland and the USA, this is not done out of charity. Indeed, Vivaldi is already earning revenues from search and bookmarks.

Vivaldi has quick commands built into it Photograph: Publicity Image

“We have deals with several different search providers in different countries, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex in Russia,” he says, “and some of the bookmarks generate earnings for us.” He reckons he only needs to make about $1 per user per year to survive, because he doesn’t have to finance the most expensive and most labour-intensive part of building a browser. Vivaldi uses Blink – Google’s fork of WebKit – so it works with the same websites.

Vivaldi has also avoided the problem of not having any extensions: it uses Chrome’s. “We spent a lot of time making sure the most popular ones worked out of the box,” Tetzchner says. “Most [extension developers] didn’t have to do anything. In some cases, there were things they had to do, but a lot of them have been reacting very positively. In general, it’s worked really well.”

The browser lets you save sessions to return to. Photograph: Publicity Image

A couple of things weren’t finished in time for the launch: synchronisation and email. “There’s a long list of features we want to add – almost every user seems to want their own options – but mail and sync are both high priorities for us,” says von Tetzchner.

The Opera browser also included email until 2013, when it was spun out as a separate program, so its inclusion in Vivaldi was no surprise. However, von Tetzchner says Vivaldi isn’t just reproducing features from Opera 12. “We’ve already taken some functions further than Opera, and we’ve done other features – such as Notes and tab-handling – in different ways. We going to continue to improve every part of the browser based on the feedback we get, and we’re very proud of the feedback we’re getting.”

Vivaldi’s bookmark manager. Photograph: Publicity Image

Most new users will, like me, use Vivaldi to replace Chrome. The bad news is that it doesn’t reduce Chrome’s greedy use of memory and processes, but will hibernate individual tabs to reclaim resources.

It includes several features designed to increase productivity. If the browser is getting cluttered, it will “stack” tabs on top of one another, using the group tab to “eat” the ones next to it. It will also “hibernate” the tab, or tile it, which displays all the grouped sites on the same page. It can be very handy to have two or three web pages side by side for comparison purposes.

Twitter open alongside another site. Photograph: Publicity Image

Vivaldi will also display an extra web page in a panel at the side of the browser, which is designed for sites like Twitter where it can be useful to keep a column of tweets in view while browsing the rest of the web.

Whether this kind of thing will appeal to less technical users is a moot point: Vivaldi isn’t aiming for world domination. Its slogan is “A browser for our friends,” and Tetzchner seems confident he can find enough of those. And he has, after all, done it before.