Only months after reaching the 2.0 milestone, the independent Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has added a bunch of useful features.

Vivaldi 2.2, out today, adds tab session management and access keys. Tab sessions are new to Vivaldi but not the browser world – Edge (RIP, or not) uses them. It's a feature so blindingly obvious, it's puzzling why it isn't a standard.

You can do lots of things with tabs, including saving collections for later

(click to enlarge)

Many websites offer keystroke shortcuts – including the in-house CMS The Register uses, for example. But nobody can remember what they are. Vivaldi now hunts this information down and presents it, if available, as a pop-up. If more sites followed the web standard, and more browsers adopted it, it would do wonders for usability.

Vivaldi Web Access Keys

As always, everything is available from Vivaldi's "Command Line", Cmd-E on the Mac, or F2 on Linux and Windows, which is becoming Vivaldi's signature feature. From here you can do things like switch tabs, make a note, adjust the page zoom or hunt down a bookmark or history item. This received an update last month.

Vivaldi 2.2 Quick Commands

Some work has started on customising the toolbar, which until now hasn't been possible.

Vivaldi remains almost unique in respecting the Do Not Track standard, which is on by default.

CEO Jon von Tetzchner told us recently that the built-in email client is undergoing an overhaul to improve performance. He's been using it as his default IMAP client for a year in private builds. "We are still doing significant rewrites in the underlying code as we optimize it and add functionality."

Von Tetzchner co-founded Opera, which introduced a radical email client in 2003. We're going out on a limb here, and wildly guessing that Vivaldi's email client might look a little like this.

Opera Mail in 2011. Opera abandoned the original browser code base two years later

As for the long-awaited mobile client, there's no commitment to a shipping date.

"We are just working through it," von Tetzchner told us. "The first version will be relatively simple, but then we will continue to add features. At the same time it will be unique to Vivaldi and it has and will have features not found elsewhere."

Vivaldi added sync in September and your reporter finally dispensed with Safari on the Mac for good. With Microsoft walking away from its own browser engine, EdgeHTML, and opting for a Chromium future, you may want to give it a look. ®