Tech

Vivaldi insists with Mastodon and… no, thanks, but no

A new version of the Vivaldi web browser has just been launched and, unlike what is usual, it is broadly a disappointment in which we hardly find any new features, but an attempt to take advantage of it that already smells musty, such as following insisting with Mastodon.

As we told you a couple of weeks ago, Vivaldi Social is a new instance of Mastodon managed by Vivaldi Technologies with which they have tried to take advantage of the situation that Twitter is going through. And it is that Mastodon has been there for a long time, ignored by everyone, but it is now when she pays attention to it.

“Almost all of the popular social networks are controlled by large companies,” Vivaldi Technologies notes. “Platforms like Mastodon, a distributed social media network based on open standards, help break down mainstream control. There is no owner, no surveillance capitalism, no tracking or profiling of users,” they add.

Vivaldi 5.6

A praiseworthy position, if it had been given months or years ago and not after smelling blood. For the rest, there are fundamental problems in Mastodon that are the same or worse than those in Twitter, and although in terms of privacy and data control there are advantages, Mastodon is far from being a real alternative to Twitter. So thanks, but no.

However, if you think otherwise, you can now enjoy the Vivaldi integration with Mastodon directly in the side panel. Plus, signing up for Vivaldi Social is as easy as logging into the server and using your Vivaldi user credentials, the same ones you use to sync data between different browser installations.

Fortunately, the fact that Vivaldi 5.6 has hardly any new features does not mean that there are none. At the functionality level, yes, there are only a couple, although one of them is really interesting: set tab groups. If you are one of those who pull groups of tabs to organize your navigation and even so the bar seems small, now you can reduce it even more.

Vivaldi 5.6

Thus, the groups of tabs will reduce their size to that of any other fixed tabs, that is, to that of the icon, but you will be able to open them with a click. The good thing is that they respect the type of tab groups you use, since as you know, Vivaldi offers two different ways to do it.

The second novelty in terms of functionality that Vivaldi 5.6 adds is that of being able to configure panel buttons as if they were toolbars. In fact, they are called the same. SIMplete open the context menu on the edge of the panel and choose: “Edit > Customize Toolbar” to see what you can do with this change.

Other novelties of Vivaldi 5.6 include a refresh of the icons in the browser settings panel, as well as a slight rearrangement of these, the addition of another search engine that respects the user’s privacy such as You, which is added to the list of engines default search; and for Vivaldi for Android, the reading list enhancement.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *