Vivaldi 7.1 sets its sync sights on tabs

Vivaldi has taken another slow step toward providing better sync options for users with the ability to push a tab to another device, plus a new weather widget in Vivaldi 7.1.

The update also adds new default search engines — Startpage, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, and Qwant — as well as the options to adjust the background themes as well as the web widgets.

Many of us at PCWorld like Vivaldi, and switched to it a while back. But Vivaldi’s sync services have been an issue — with a cloud outage cutting access to Vivaldi sync services for days last December, and a more substantial problem: that one configuration of Vivaldi on one browser can’t easily be reproduced on another.

Vivaldi appears to be avoiding the issue by asking you to do the legwork. On one hand, Vivaldi 7.1 does include a new sync feature: Send Tab to Device allows you to instantly share tabs to other devices that are logged in to Vivaldi. That feature doesn’t appear to happen automatically, however, and it’s limited to Vivaldi browsers on PCs. Syncing to the mobile version of Vivaldi will arrive on January 30, Vivaldi said.

Otherwise, Vivaldi’s method of avoiding true syncing is to ask you to “export” features from Vivaldi’s browser. Import Open Tabs is a new feature that allows the Vivaldi browser to slurp up your open tabs that are running on a different browser, like Chrome or Edge. Vivaldi than opens them in its own browser framework, with the idea that you’ll shut down the other browser and continue work on Vivaldi instead.

Finally, the new version adds a weather widget, which takes Vivaldi’s useful sidebar (where you can access web-based email and a list of RSS feeds, for example) and adds local weather to it. This does seem a bit on the superficial side, as most Windows 11 PCs hide a weather widget down in the corner of the screen. However, you can also look up weather in foreign cities, something that Windows’ own weather widget isn’t really designed to do.

The new VIvaldi 7.1 update is available today.