The Vivaldi browser now ships with a little Mastodon

Vivaldi gets its Mastodon, on

Vivaldi (once known as Opera) has introduced a new version of its eponymously named browser introducing an all-new feature built in support for rapidly growing social network, Mastodon.

Mastodon is becoming mainstream

Vivaldi launched its own Mastodon community just a few weeks ago (you’ll find me there when you sign up). Now it has added a built in Mastodon button in the sidebar, so you can share directly from within your browser.

Vivaldi’s integration is customizable, so you can also add any Mastodon instance of your choice as a Web Panel to this sidebar.

It’s a neat reflection of the growing strength of the open source movement.

The evident way the world’s richest man was able to take over popular social network, Twitter, has become a valuable argument against the total commoditization of online communications. One response to which has been massive growth on the part of Mastodon, from 300,000 to 2.6 million users in a matter of weeks.

Mastodon is a network of federated servers (called instances), small communities which join to become vast. That means you can join a community on one server, such as Vivaldi’s, and still interact with millions of other Mastodon users. Of course, running these servers has a cost, which is why joining servers run by larger entities makes sense.

Vivaldi 5.6 is available now

Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the new browser – Vivaldi 5.6 – also lets users pin tab stacks and bakes in support for new private search engine You.com for select countries.

Redesigned Settings menu

The ability to pin collections of tabs is a bit of a step up, I think. Just right-click on the Tab Stack and select the pin option from the context menu and free up the space an entire stack uses on the tab bar. The browser also now boasts a much improved Settings page. That matters because the developers of Vivaldi believe intrinsically in providing users with a vast array of customizable options for the browser, which is why it has become the most configurable browser you can get.

Take a look.

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