Over the past few years, privacy has become integral to users. A couple of months back, Microsoft added more privacy-focused features to Windows 10, providing customers "more control" over their data.
Perhaps privacy and security of data matter the most in web browsers, where users are more susceptible to attacks from malicious sources. As such, today Vivaldi has introduced a new feature dubbed "History" with the release of version 1.8 of its browser, allowing users more insights into their browsing activities, and enabling them to keep their data private.
Vivaldi says that the latest iteration of its browser will enable users to view details about their online activities, aided by "visual cues" and statistics. History will illustrate important information regarding browsing habits in graphs and color-coded heat maps, and display web history in a calendar view.
Apart from this, even if a user does not remember a particular search term, Vivaldi will provide hints to put "searches in context", with result filtering options available as well.
Vivaldi boasts that all the browsing information belonging to its users is completely local and private. Jon von Tetzchner, CEO at Vivaldi Technologies, had the following to say:
"We want to make browsing history more useful than ever before. Instead of having to scroll through hundreds of lines, Vivaldi gives a comprehensive overview of history, presented in a visual way. This lets our users analyze their online activity and helps them find what they are looking for.
[...] The new History feature shows the kind of data that could be tracked by third parties. Instead of trying to monetize our users’ browsing patterns, we are giving them this data – for their eyes only."
The full list of features introduced in version 1.8 of Vivaldi"s browser can be viewed below:
- Create notes with drag-and-drop. Vivaldi lets users take notes in the Side Panel as a convenient way of adding thoughts and ideas to websites. It is now possible to create notes by simply dragging and dropping selected text into the Notes menu – not only from the browser itself, but from any other application. Users can also right-click on the text on the website they’re currently browsing and select “Copy to Note” from the drop-down menu to create a new note.
- Advanced tab muting. Vivaldi offers many ways of controlling unwanted noise in the browser, and the latest release adds new options for muting tabs. Users can now choose if they want to allow sounds in all tabs; only let the active tab play sound or let the background tab play sound, as long as the active tab doesn’t.
- Preference to enable or disable auto-updates on Windows.
- Option to set the home page to Start page.
- Ability to open links in the current tab from the right-click menu.
- An option to display hibernated tabs in grayscale.
- Matches are highlighted in the address bar drop-down menu.
- Translation improvements for Chromium.
- Image search from the right-click menu.