The Vivaldi browser team has unveiled a new History feature, giving users insights into their online behavior. The latest release also includes more options for taking notes in the browser, powerful sound control for tabs and other improvements.
Vivaldi’s new History feature lets users explore their browsing patterns, backed by statistics and visual clues.
“We want to make browsing history more useful than ever before,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO at Vivaldi Technologies. “Instead of having to scroll through hundreds of lines, Vivaldi gives a comprehensive overview of history, presented in a visual way. This lets our users analyze their online activity and helps them find what they are looking for.”The new History feature lets Vivaldi users quickly scan through visited websites and get helpful hints for finding old URLs.
In addition to the list of URLs offered by most browsers, Vivaldi shows history in a calendar view with detailed statistics about previously visited sites. Graphs and a color-coded heat map overlay add another dimension, showing peaks of online activity and key browsing trends.
All this data helps find previously visited web pages even when users cannot remember the right search term. Vivaldi’s history puts searches in context – it may be easier to find an old URL if the user recalls seeing it on a certain day when he or she was particularly active online.
Vivaldi users can also narrow down the search to a date range either from the monthly view or from the Day Picker Calendar. In addition to that, users can filter search results by date, title, address and views.
All of this information is strictly private and local to a user’s computer – Vivaldi doesn’t collect user’s history data.
“The new History feature shows the kind of data that could be tracked by third parties,” says von Tetzchner. “Instead of trying to monetize our users’ browsing patterns, we are giving them this data – for their eyes only.”
With the ability to analyze this information, users can decide if they want to adjust their online behavior or remove certain items from the list.
Vivaldi’s Side Panel with fast access to bookmarks, downloads, notes and websites of users’ choice now also includes History. Clicking on the History icon will reveal a list of previously visited URLs alongside open websites. This way, users can quickly search through history without leaving the current page.
