Vivaldi 2.0 review: browsers do not have to be so bland

Roughly a year and a half later, Vivaldi has recently hit the 2.0 milestone. You can download the latest version from the Vivaldi site or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS. And at first blush, perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. This release is a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened.

While the version number here does mean something, it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood, Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates, and, like Chrome and Firefox, it issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing as part of 2.0 actually trickled in over time, rather than arriving all together in one monolithic release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.

Vivaldi is a great browser, and I'm glad such a power-user oriented browser - from the founder of Opera, unsurprisingly - still exists. I use it as my main browser every now and then just to see its state of development, and I'll be sure to give 2.0 another go for a few weeks.