Former Opera CEO launches new browser

Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera and CEO of the company until 2010, launches a new web browser aimed primarily at power users. Von Tetzchner and his colleagues believe that Opera has gone in the wrong direction.

Von Tetzchner told TechCrunch that he came up with the idea of ​​developing the Vivaldi browser after Opera phased out its own Presto engine and based the browser on Chromium, the open source project that forms the basis for Google Chrome. According to the former CEO, Opera has always been built around a community and the browser had “a strong connection with its users”, but that is no longer the case.

All the more striking is that Vivaldi, which has been working on for a year and a half, has also taken the Chromium source code as a starting point. The 25-man team would not have been big enough to develop their own render engine, and the team ultimately chose Chromium over Mozilla’s render engine; according to von Tetzchner, that was the safest option.

The browser is currently available for download as a tech preview. According to the makers, the browser is aimed at power users, and to this end offers, among other things, the possibility to compose keyboard commands yourself. At the same time, the browser is not yet finished: there is no toolbar for bookmarks and support for extensions is not yet available. That functionality should be added in future versions, as well as a mail client.