A New Browser To Rival The Best Of Them [1]

It's been a while since anyone has launched a new web browser that has attracted my attention. Sure, there are regular announcements from various organisations, but they frequently amount to nothing. One, for example, was launched a couple of months ago and claimed to offer enhanced security through its built-in free VPN. But when I questioned the company behind it, they wouldn't give any details about how it worked and thus I didn't have sufficient confidence to recommend it to you.

The other day, however, saw the launch of version 1.7 of Vivaldi. It's a browser that's been in development for a while, and progressively gets better all the time. This is evident even from the time you install it, at which point it has the courtesy to ask what colour scheme you'd like to use, where you want the tab bar to be positioned, and so on.

There are loads of other features too. And because it's based on Chromium (the same open-source browser from which Google builds Chrome) it's both innovative and yet strangely familiar. And it doesn't crash anywhere near as often as Microsoft Edge does.

If you feel like a change of browser, give Vivaldi a go. You can install it alongside any existing browsers that you have. It's a 38 MB download from www.vivaldi.com [3] and is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust. There's also a very active forum at http://forum.vivaldi.net [4] where you can learn a lot about the product as well as ask questions of the developers.