If you know me, you know I love talking about my favorite web browser, Vivaldi, and just last week, the team behind it released what it called the biggest update ever for the browser. This update introduced a new design language with floating tabs, some new icons, and a brand-new feature called Dashboard, which lets you add widgets to a starting page so you can see quick information from different websites and Vivaldi features at a glance.

But while Vivaldi teased this as a major update, I think it actually feels kind of small, and there's a lot more that could be done to make this browser better. In fact, I think this update adds more things for me to complain about than it adds improvements I really needed. So let's take a look at all the things that still need to be done after Vivaldi's big 7.0 update.

5 Importing data should be easier

I was wrong, but not completely

Last week, I complained that Vivaldi offered no way to import feeds using an OPML file, which made the Feeds feature a bit less useful to me, because I never want to set up all my feeds manually again. Thankfully, someone in the comments pointed out that Vivaldi does, in fact, let you import feeds via OPML, and I'm incredibly thankful for that.

However, learning this made me aware of a different problem: Vivaldi doesn't educate its users about this well at all. The option to import data in Vivaldi is in the Vivaldi menu in the top left corner, under Files > Import from applications or files. Sure, if you know the UI, this does the job, but I never knew this option existed, let alone that it meant you can import all kinds of things. Indeed, this menu has a ton of options for importing browser data, mail files, notes, and yes, feeds. But this is never mentioned anywhere.

When I want to add feeds, my instinct is to open the Feeds page and click the Add button. The same goes for any of these features, really. How would a regular user know that this ability is there when it's not mentioned in any of the relevant areas? Even if you open the Vivaldi settings window and go to the Feeds section, you can't import files from there. Vivaldi needs to move these options to meet users where they're more likely to go first. At least this has gone from a major complaint to a somewhat minor issue, so I apologize for getting that wrong before.

4 Fix the bugs

This new update adds a big new problem

Vivaldi 7.0 added many things, but the most notable one for me has been a bug where pinned tabs take up the entire vertical space along their position. Not visually, but when I move my mouse over a part of the current page that's directly below one of my pinned tabs, Vivaldi will act as if I'm hovering over the tab itself, and clicking will switch to the tab, rather than interact with the UI element I'm actually pointing at. The best I can explain is is using the video below.

I don't know how something like this happens, but obviously, it shouldn't, so it needs to fixed as soon as possible. It's been very frustrating.

3 It still won't sync all my data

Signing in during setup should be a basic step

Syncing data was a big complaint I had with Vivaldi prior to this update, and one of the issues I mentioned was actually fixed: faster syncing. Vivaldi 7.0 introduced instant sync, which makes it much easier to jump from one device to another. But the other two big issues weren't addressed.

First off, signing in during setup. I get that the crowd of Vivaldi users probably has some overlap with people trying to get away from an account system where all their data is stored, but for most people, a Vivaldi account is more beneficial than not, and syncing is a big part of that. I just installed the latest version of Vivaldi from scratch on a computer, and just like before, it didn't ask me to sign in when I set it up. So when I did sign in, the sponsored bookmarks that Vivaldi created by default were all synced to my account again. If you just ask me to sign in before creating browsing data, this could be avoided, and I would have access to my synced data faster while I go through the rest of the setup process.

Plus, Vivaldi still won't sync all the types of data that I wish it did. It syncs browsing data, but since we're using a Vivaldi account, why not sync other data, too? Sync my email accounts so it's easier to set up on a new PC, and sync my feeds so I don't have to manually import them and mark them as read each time. It's frustrating that not only I have to manually add feeds on a new computer, I then also have to check which articles I've actually read, because all the feeds that are added are labeled as unread. Syncing this information across devices would save me a lot of time and frustration.

2 Improve the address bar

Something is still not right

I've complained numerous times about the slowness of the address bar in Vivaldi, and to give credit to the team, things seem to have improved with the latest update. However, something is clearly wrong with Vivaldi's approach here.

See, the browser lets you enable or disable certain kinds of suggestions in the address bar, and I typically disable Frequently visited sites. The reason for this is that Vivaldi will sometimes make suggestions that don't make sense to me based on this. For example, if I type mail, there are two main options in my history: mail.google.com and mail.sapo.pt (a Portuguese email service). Now, I visit mail.google.com daily, and multiple times a day, while I only visit mail.sapo.pt once a week at best. However, Vivaldi always suggests the latter to me when I type mail in the address bar, which has caused me to open the wrong page numerous times. This is why I disabled this option, after which I get the right suggestion every time.

But disabling this option also seems to be why there's a split-second delay in updating the best result when I type something. As I've described before, when I type XDA and press Enter, I often end up performing a web search instead of opening the website. So the logic for suggested results needs to improve a bit, though that delay I've mentioned has gotten better.

1 Build out the dashboard

The foundation is good, but it needs a lot more

Finally, there's the big shiny new feature that makes Vivaldi 7.0 the biggest update yet — the dashboard. While this is a very interesting addition, there are some big problems holding it back from being truly useful for me.

First off, the sizes of widgets are very limiting. you can only choose between regular and tall widgets, and even the tall ones are pretty small if you want to add a website as a widget. I think a manually resizing option would be the best approach, but maybe have specific increment values so things still look fairly uniform.

I also think some of the widgets for Vivaldi features fall a little short of being completely useful. I can open important emails or news stories from my feeds, but I can't use the dashboard itself to mark items as read, which is a bummer. I wish I could interact with these features directly from the widgets, so I didn't still have to open the Mail and Feeds pages separately to clear my notifications.

Likewise, the notes widget lets me write a note, but that note doesn't seem to sync with the notes sidebar, and I can't access notes from my sidebar in the dashboard. I can kind of understand the idea of keeping these things separate, but not having the option to have them connected is a wasted opportunity in my opinion.

We're so close to perfection

Vivaldi 7.0 definitely made some welcome improvements and additions to what's still my favorite browser, but there's a lot of work that can still be done to make this the perfect browser for me. I don't think I'm asking for too much here, so hopefully the team will make these improvements sooner rather than later.