Windows users are probably familiar with the ability to “snap” windows in various corners of their screen. Vivaldi is proposing a similar arrangement within Vivaldi 7.8, but within tiles on the pages of its browser. It’s a meaningful addition.
Vivaldi calls this “tab tiling,” and it’s part of the latest iteration of its free Web browser, or Vivaldi 7.8. Vivaldi is complementing it by adding a “open as tiled tab” feature, too. Tabs can be organized and reorganized, and set to refresh periodically for live content or for other reasons.
Essentially, what you gain here is some additional pixels. If you’re like me, you open dozens of tabs in your browser. As Vivaldi also notes in its blog, I use the additional tabs to go back and forth with my notes, or dedicate additional tabs for my research. Of course, the additional windows and tabs can come up with additional pixel cruft: any bookmarks or favorites, toolbars, and so on. It appears Vivaldi give you a bit of that — a title or URL bar, for example — but not much more.
The only downside appears to be trading tabs for display space: if you end up pushing more and more tiled tabs into a tiny space, you’ll be able to see less and less of each one. As always, you’ll probably have to experiment and see what works best.
Vivaldi
Vivaldi has made a second addition which you might find useful, too: the ability to pin a tab to a specific page. Again, I have a tendency to scatter multiple tabs and windows across the screen. In an undisciplined moment, I sometimes grab a “free” tab and use it for additional work, without realizing that I had originally assigned that tab to a specific task or piece of information. You can now dedicate and lock a tab to a specific “current” site to help prevent that from happening.
In a similar vein, you can now assign a tab to your Vivaldi Mail, and have that tab follow you around various workspaces. I think I might find this to be useful, as Vivaldi usually serves as a handy mail client / RSS reader. Now if the browser would also keep those RSS feeds in the cloud to avoid manually duplicating them on new machines…
Vivaldi