Former CEO Opera releases second developer version of new browser

The developers of the very young browser Vivaldi, founded by the co-founder of competitor Opera, have released a new version. This is the second technical preview, which contains some new features.

They announced this in a blog post. In it they write that they have added some new functionalities to the recently announced browser. One of these is the ability to enable or disable the loading of web page images per tab. It is also possible to load images only from the cache, which should reduce data consumption.

Furthermore, the Technical Preview 2 has some remarkable innovations. For example, the options ‘fast-forward’ and ‘rewind’ offer the possibility to quickly navigate within a website. For this, the users do not first have to browse forwards or backwards in steps, but can browse through a domain in one go. The second test release also offers an experimental feature that allows navigation with the shift key and the arrow keys.

The very young browser Vivaldi, which has not yet been released for a final release, was announced in January by Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera and CEO of the company until 2010. He started with a team of developers with the new web browser that is mainly aimed at power users. Von Tetzchner and his colleagues believe that Opera has gone in the wrong direction, for example by phasing out its own Presto engine and losing contact with the community.

Vivaldi, which has been working on for a year and a half, is based on Google’s Chromium browser. The development team would not be large enough to develop its own render engine. The browser is not finished yet; new functions are still being worked on, such as a mail client.

Besides Vivaldi, there is another browser that originated from the Opera family. The browser, Otter, was released last year with the aim of restoring Opera 12’s classic interface. Developers are still working on that a lot. Otter’s first final is expected to be released in June.