Vivaldi announced a major change coming to the browser's update mechanism that will make updates a lot smaller in the near future.

Up until now, each new version of Vivaldi had to be downloaded in full to update an older version -- be it a stable release or a snapshot release.

While that may not have mattered that much to stable users, there were only a couple of stable releases this year so far, beta users may have noticed it because of the increased frequency in which snapshots are released.

So, basically, whenever a new update was released the full version of Vivaldi had to be downloaded to the system.

Vivaldi Delta updates

Starting with Vivaldi version 1.5.626.8 on Windows, that is no longer the case. Vivaldi switched to delta updates in that build which means that only the actual changes are downloaded.

You are probably wondering how big of a deal that is. While it depends on what is being released, the first snapshot update that Vivaldi released is less than 200 Kiloybte in size.

While that does not introduce any major new features, that's certainly an improvement over download 40 or so Megabytes for browser updates.

Users benefit from this a lot, as updates are downloaded faster and thus also installed faster. This means less wait time for an update to be applied to the browser. Also, bandwidth is saved in the process but that is probably only important to businesses and not home systems considering that Vivaldi updates are far and few between.

Vivaldi on the other hand benefits from delta updates as well. Besides making customers happy, the company saves on its bandwidth bill. Imagine having to deliver a 40 Megabyte update to one million users, or an update that is just 4 Megabyte in size.

The bandwidth needed would drop from 40 million Megabytes to just 4 million Megabytes (40 Terabyte to 4 Terabyte).

One caveat is that delta updates are only available for Windows versions of Vivaldi currently. The company announced however that it is working on bringing the delta update feature to Mac and Linux versions of the Vivaldi web browser in the near future.

Closing Words

Many major browsers, Firefox and Chrome for instance, make use of delta updates already. It is good to see Vivaldi introducing the functionality to the web browser as well.

Now You: What's your take on the change and the direction Vivaldi is heading in general?

Summary Article Name Vivaldi introduces Delta updates Description Vivaldi announced a major change coming to the browser's update mechanism that will make updates a lot smaller in the near future. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

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