Domain Qube: Vivaldi Browser’s New Feature Makes History

Vivaldi Browser, the brainchild of Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner, is launching a new feature that’s downright historic. Today, the browser reveals its History feature, which provides users with detailed insight into their browsing behavior.

This isn’t just your average history record. Instead of users simply looking at what websites they visited—line-by-line and row-by-row, like other browsers—Vivaldi gives them visual clues instead.

According to the company’s latest press release, the new feature means users can conduct a full-fledged analysis of their browsing patterns, all supported by stats and a visually friendly interface.

As von Tetzchner puts it:

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.

So say goodbye to the days of monotonously scanning your browser’s history until you finally find what you’ve been looking for. This new feature lets Vivaldi’s users efficiently locate what they’re searching for by allowing quick scans through visited sites and offering helpful hints when searching for older URLs.

The end result is a better user experience.

Users will also be pleasantly surprised by the use of a calendar view to present all this history data. Changing to a calendar view provides users with a more user-friendly interface that’s easier to look through than having to scan line-by-line, as with traditional history views.

In addition, a color-coded heat map and graphs to the right of the calendar give users a further layer of depth to their history browsing. Key browsing trends and the user’s online-activity peak round out the data that’s available for analysis.

These changes allow users to locate previously visited webpages even if they fail to remember the exact search term. That’s because this new feature puts searches in context. For instance, it will help users find an old URL if they see it show up on a specific day when they were more active on the web.

Users also have full control over their history search: They’re able to narrow down their search to a range of dates from the monthly view or just from the Day Picker Calendar. Just for good measure, users also have the power to filter their search results by title, date, views and addresses.

Perhaps the best part of this update is the emphasis on privacy rights. Vivaldi never collects the user’s history data because all of this data is local to a user’s browser.

Using the history feature is straightforward. Vivaldi has incorporated History into the browser’s Side Panel, so simply clicking on the History icon will show the user the list of previously visited URLs, right next to the open sites. This design allows users to efficiently search through their history without having to leave their current page.