You’re going to start hearing a lot about Vivaldi. While the name might bring music to your ears, Vivaldi is actually a search engine that has just gotten a major facelift. The search engine has existed for some time, but now the developers behind Vivaldi have told press that the new search engine is for “power users.”

Defining a Power User

Vivaldi describes its ultimate audience as those that like to take notes when browsing, want to get screen grabs, and need to multitask when researching. Even though anyone can use the new search engine, users that do like to make the most of any search will find Vivaldi the most useful.

Vivaldi was created to be a replacement for Google’s Chrome and runs on the same engine (Chromium). This search engine works with most of Chrome’s extensions as well, so that makes getting Vivaldi started a lot easier for the development team (spread across Norway and the USA). What didn’t make it at the launch date was email, but the team is working on fixing that problem and has launched anyway.

You May Recall…

Vivaldi isn’t entirely new. This is the same team that was behind the Opera search engine a few years ago only back then the team had outside investors that (essentially) wanted Opera to be another Google. When attempting to take on the Google giant failed (as it was likely to), the Vivaldi team wanted out from under investor wings. Now the team operates on its own and without dictation from any outside influence.

Vivaldi aims to be a browser that only a select few will want to use, and so far the browser is generating income by appealing to the exact audience that it was created for. But don’t assume that the new Vivaldi is just like Opera was. This version of the company’s browser has new features that belong to Vivaldi alone, though it did take some of the better features from Opera.

Some Fun Features

Some of the cool features that Vivaldi offers include a browser stacking option (so if you open up too many tabs they will simply stack on top of each other making finding things easier and less cluttered). Vivaldi also titles tabs that are open, so all the same tabs are grouped together (works really well for research purposes).

Another really interesting feature is that this search engine will let you display a side tab on any webpage. So let’s say that you want to keep a Twitter feed running while you are looking at another web page. With Vivaldi that feed will just run on the side of the page and you can keep tabs on everything that you are doing at once.

Should You Switch?

It’s going to be hard for Vivaldi to get a lot of Chrome users to make the switch from Chrome to Vivaldi. However, Vivaldi is worth trying out if you do like the multi-task and need a search engine that’s better than what Chrome offers in the multi-tasking area.