Vivaldi technologies is a company created by former CEO and co-founder of Opera software Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner who is also the brainchild behind the Vivaldi web browser.
The browser is aimed at power users as it tries to reincarnate the previous popular features found in Opera 12 mashed up with new and innovative ones geared towards enhancing both user experience as well as software stability.
Giving the browser an old feel from what Opera used to have allowed Vivaldi to entice many users of the Opera web browser who felt let down after Opera Software decided to move from the Presto Layout Engine to the Blink Layout Engine.
To keep things running smoothly for Vivaldi, the developers update the browser weekly using a method they dubbed “Snapshots.”
Snapshot 1.3.537.5 has arrived and with it, bringing much-needed features for Linux as well as address some of the problems raised during the previous Snapshot that includes fixes to the private window crash, problems with the selection of custom background image and issues with broken proprietary media on the most Linux distros.
To address some of these issues, the Linux Proprietary media system is made more robust on Ubuntu with additional support for OpenSUSE and Slackware users.
Improved support is coming to proprietary media (MP4 [H.264/MPEG-4AVC & AAC] Video and MP3 Audio) and those running Ubuntu only need to install the chromium-codecs-FFmpeg-extra package as the provide a well-suited library. It should be noted that though this library is supported, only certain version of the package is accepted.
“[…] we provide packages and updates in the most two common formats (.rpm and .deb) but are happy to work with any Linux distribution to see if Vivaldi can be included directly. In addition, even where we do not provide a native package format, we will accept bug reports from users of any Linux distribution and attempt to fix the issues they might encounter.”
This statement is an extract from the official Vivaldi website explaining why only fixes are provided and not the entire Slackware package.
