Vivaldi 1.8: better audio management, drag and drop notes

Vivaldi Technologies AS released the first development version of Vivaldi 1.8 on Tuesday featuring better audio management and drag & drop note taking support.

The Norwegian company released Vivaldi 1.7 last week, and has been busy since fixing bugs and adding new features to the next upcoming version of the web browser.

If you are on the development channel you may have received the update to the new version already. If you have not, you may select Vivaldi > Help > Check for Updates to run a manual check.

The new version comes with a surprising number of new features. Surprising, because the last stable release happened just a week ago.

Audio management

I start with the feature that I like the most. Vivaldi has great audio management capabilities already that let you mute sound in the browser with the keyboard or mouse easily.

The new feature improves that functionality further. It enables you to set audio playing preferences.

1. Load vivaldi://settings/tabs/ in the browser's address bar to get started.
2. Scroll down until you come to the Tab Muting section.

There you find three options. The first, play all audio, is exactly how all modern web browsers handle audio. If a site or service wants to play audio, it is allowed regardless of whether that is in the active tab, or the background.

The two other options change that. The first, Play Only in Active Tab, blocks all background sounds in the browser. This is the case even if there is no sound in the active tab.

The other option, Prioritize Active Tab, handles that better if you like to play audio in background tabs at times. If there is no audio playing in the active tab, a background tab is allowed to play audio. If sound starts to play in the active tab, all background tabs are muted automatically.

The feature automates audio management in Vivaldi. Instead of having to mute tabs regularly or occasionally using keyboard or mouse, you may now select one of the automated options when it comes to audio playback in the web browser.

Notes via drag and drop

Vivaldi supported note taking for some time, and has improved the feature recently in regards to screenshot taking.

The new update lets you drag and drop text to the notes sidebar to add it as a new note directly. This may be faster than having to copy and paste the information to the notes area using mouse and/or keyboard.

So, if you use the note taking feature already, you may find the new addition useful as it may speed things up for you.

Other changes

The developers changed a couple of other things in the new development release of Vivaldi 1.8 on top of that.

It is now possible to sort the browsing history in the History Panel. Simply click on the "sort by date" menu at the top, and select one of the other sort options (title, address, page views).

The right-click context menu of links has a new open link option which -- duh -- opens the link in the same tab.

The last change lets you set the Vivaldi Start Page as the default homepage.

Closing Words

The features sound really promising, especially the audio management one.

Now You: Do you find the features useful?