Whoever reads me from time to time will have noticed that my default web browser is Vivaldi (the reasons are different and varied, like right now I have the information on the right and the WordPress editor on the left) and that I am honest and critical when something does not seem like the best idea. Today, Jon von Tetzchner announced Vivaldi 6.1, and has highlighted a change that I think could do a lot more.
After a (long for my taste) text explaining the past and present of the Vivaldi User-Agent, von Tetzchner explained that when we visit Bing with Vivaldi 6.1, the browser identifies itself as Microsoft Edge, so we can we access bing chat without any problem. Or at least that's what they say; I have not been able to verify it yet in Linux and I do not know if my operating system is included in this novelty. But I don't care much either.
Vivaldi 6.1 improves workspaces
Let's keep talking about User Agent. I do not intend to go into great detail explaining what it is, but it is a string of information that our browser sends to different web pages. If the page does not like something, it imposes certain restrictions on us. So Vivaldi 6.1 being able to access Bing Chat seems like a start to me, but I think it could be better.
three years ago shazam.com can be accessed to identify songs, but only from Safari. Therefore, being able to access Bing Chat seems to me a first step, but a tiny one and with an expiration date. When it is officially allowed, the star novelty of Vivaldi 6.1 will come to nothing. What would be nice would be for the list to be longer and include more websites, or for an option to be introduced in the settings to change the User-Agent per website.
Vivaldi's v6.0 introduced that Workspaces. It's not like I'm with 10 workspaces all the time, but I do have at least two: the normal one and the publish one. When I go to write an article I move all the tabs to my "Publish" space and start as a new session with fewer distractions, without having to close anything. Vivaldi 6.1 has improved the workspaces so that we can now drag and drop them to organize them.
Ability to copy multiple links at once
Related to, or with workspaces in mind, multiple links can now be shared at the same time. Suppose we are looking for documentation on a topic, for example how to get a hardware component working in our Linux distribution, we find the solution and want to share it. In Vivaldi 6.1 this is very simple: by secondary/right clicking on a stack of tabs, several selected tabs or on a workspace from its menu we can copy all links to share.
Among the rest of the news, the CEO of Vivaldi Technologies tells us about a new assistant after the installation from scratch and that Vivaldi is now available on iOS/iPadOS, but in beta phase and via TestFlight. To see the full list of changes, it's worth visiting the link we added at the beginning of this post.