There has been a significant surge in the use of and dependence on the Internet over the past months as more and more our former face-to-face interactions move online. On the one hand, that has allowed people to conveniently work from home but, on the other hand, it has also thrown some of these people’s work-life balance out the window. It may be even harder for people to detach from their computers, especially their web browsers, so Vivaldi is giving them a single button to put the Web on hold long enough for you to take a breather.
There are countless browser extensions that put limits on social media time or stop you from switching tabs too much but all of these still leave things running in the background anyway. True to its philosophy of making power features built-in rather than add-on, Vivaldi is providing a single button or keyboard shortcut to instantly cut you off from the Internet, at least for a while.
Break Mode can be toggled with the pause button at the left side of the window’s status bar and it will immediately mutes or stops playing media, hides all pretty much all of the UI, leaving your screen clean and blank. A single click is also all that’s needed to bring back the chaos, hopefully after you’ve taken a break or gotten some physical movement. Interestingly, the feature can also be used as a poor man’s privacy toggle to temporarily hide your (presumably) work when interrupted by family, friends, or even colleagues.
This Break Mode is rolling out in Vivaldi version 3.3 but that isn’t the release’s only feature. In line with the likes of Chrome and Firefox are doing, Vivaldi will also emphasize URLs and highly only the base domain to help fight phishing attempts. You can also now block Ad Trackers in whole pages and Private Window now has a different theme to easily distinguish it from non-private sessions.
Vivaldi started way back in 2015 with the goal of surfacing and providing power user features rather than hiding them behind obscure settings flags. But while the browser has been making strides on the desktop, it still has to leave a mark on the mobile world with its Android version still inching towards its first stable release.