I'm keeping a close eye on the development of the Vivaldi browser as it shows some promise especially when compared to other Chromium-based browsers.

Vivaldi Technologies releases snapshot builds of the technical preview of the browser regularly which introduce new features more often than not.

While it lacks certain features, the pace of development and the introduction of new features is refreshing.

The two most recent builds of the web browser are not exceptions to the rule as they introduce a whole batch of new or improved features.

Probably the biggest of them all is the automatic update feature on Windows. While limited to Windows currently, it get rids of the manual update process on the operating system. Not only did you have to install the update manually, you also had to visit a website regularly to find out about a new release in first place.

An option to check for new updates manually has been added to the help menu of the browser which you open with a click on the V-icon in the interface.

The browser's tab stacking feature, similar to the way classic Opera introduced it a long time ago, has received an improvement as well.

Tab stacking enables you to create a stack out of multiple open tabs by dragging them on top of each other. This stack uses the same space as a single tab which makes it ideal for situations where the tab bar overflows with open tabs already.

The new feature allows you to display all tabs of a stack side by side in a single tab. How this looks like? See for yourself:

The new feature is not limited to two tabs. If you add four tabs to a stack and invoke the feature, all four tabs are displayed side by side in the interface.

To display tabs of a stack side by side, right-click on the stack and select tile tab stack from the context menu.

According to the most recent blog post on the official blog, on-demand plugins were added to the browser's image blocking feature.

Vivaldi, just like classic Opera, supports options to turn off image loading completely or limit it to the cache.

On-demand plugins is not explained but it should mean click-to-play. This blocks plugin contents from being loaded directly giving users the chance to select contents that should be loaded. This improves loading time and privacy.

I could not get this to work in the most recent build though. Even though I did disable images during tests, Flash contents did load on that page. My expectation was that they would not be loaded automatically because of the on-demand feature.

You can download the most recent build of the Vivaldi browser from the official website. It is offered as 32-bit and 64-bit builds for all supported operating systems.

Summary Article Name Latest Vivaldi build introduces automatic updates Description The most recent build of the Vivaldi web browser introduces auto-updates on Windows and tab-stacking improvements. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

Advertisement