Why I Love Vivaldi

The web browser, that is. Well, one of the reasons. I actually like a lot of things about it and dislike some others but overall it's the best option available. I might write more about it some other time but I just felt like writing about this particular feature today. What feature? The options you get when you right-click on a hyperlink.

Hyperlink context menus in the current versions of the two browsers.

You're probably used to the menu on the right (although possibly without the uBlock Origin "Block element" option) and know what the options there do. You're less likely to be familiar with the one on the left since almost nobody uses Vivaldi. The first thing you'll notice is that the top two sections in Vivaldi's menu are equivalent to the top one section in Firefox's, but have more options. But what do they do?

"Open Link in New Tab" appears in both menus but doesn't actually do the same thing. In Firefox the new tab will open in the background. If you want to see it you have to manually switch to it. In Opera "Open Link in New Background Tab" does that while "Open Link in New Tab" opens a new tab and switches to it in one action. I use both "New Tab" and "New Background Tab" all the time and Firefox only having the one option irritates me, I'd say, about 50% of the times I click it. Sometimes I do want to open something in the background to look at later, but sometimes I want to open it and look at it immediately. Having both options available just makes sense and I don't know why Vivaldi is the only browser that does.

"Open Link in New Window" and "Open Link in [New] Private Window" do the same thing in both browsers, but there's another extra option in Vivaldi: "Open Link". What does that do? It's not obvious but it's another one I use a lot. You know how some websites do that thing where you click a link and it automatically opens in a new tab? "Open Link" overrides that behaviour and forces the link to open in the same tab. It just saves you having to close a tab. Handy.

The other difference I like is more a matter of aesthetics. Vivaldi says "Copy link address" where Firefox says "Copy Link Location". They do the exact same thing, but use a different word. And the thing is, an address and a location are not the same thing. One of them is the correct word to use in this context and the other is not.

An address is a piece of information that tells you where a particular thing is or how to find it. A location is a place. So which is copied, the address or the location? It's the address. What ends up in your clipboard is something like https://www.google.com/. That is not a location. It's not a place. It's a string of text.

Sometimes the words are used synonymously, but there is a difference, and that difference applies when you're talking about copying. If I tell you where I live and you write it down, you've copied my address, not my actual house. The address tells you where my house is and helps you get there, but you don't have a copy of the location. You haven't written down my house. The same applies to websites. The hyperlink contains an address that points to a location. The address is not the location and when you copy the address you are not copying the location.

That's an unreasonable peeve of mine, but the extra options for opening links are genuinely convenient and every browser should have them. It's one of those things that slows me down and irritates me whenever I have to use someone else's computer. You'd think that such a simple and elegant feature would have been copied by literally everyone, but Opera had these options for years and even Vivaldi, a browser designed to recreate the best features of Opera (before it was gutted) didn't have them initially, and no one else seems to be bothering.

But that's one reason I use Vivaldi.