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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The Vivaldi browser has a new release with many additions.
- You can fully customize the look and feel of the Tab Bar – and other bars.
- Vertical tab fans will especially appreciate the new options.
I enjoy a good aesthetic. If you’ve followed me long enough, you totally get that. I will not cave to the ordinary.
If you were to take a look at any given desktop (or laptop, or mobile device), you’ll immediately see what I mean. Honestly, I cannot remember a time when I’ve accepted the default aesthetic on an app (unless said app doesn’t allow theming and tweaking — yeah, I’m talking to you, Spotify).
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I’ve spent countless hours customizing my desktops and the apps that run on them. So, it should come as no surprise that I was happy to hear the Vivaldi browser now allows you to fully customize the tab bar.
Huzzah.
I immediately opened the browser and started customizing. With the latest iteration of Vivaldi, you can customize not only the tab bar, but all the bars (address bar, status bar, and even the panel).
The customizations allow you to add or remove elements from the various bars and, thanks to the theming engine, you can make the tab bar really stand out.
Now, I prefer vertical tabs in every browser I use (which is why there are some browsers I simply don’t want to work with), so being able to customize the tab bar becomes even more important to me. (After all, the vertical version of the tab bar is considerably wider than the top or bottom versions.)
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Let me show you how I customized my tab bar in Vivaldi.
Enabling vertical tabs
The first thing you’ll want to do is enable vertical tabs. Here’s how.
Of course, to do this, you must open the Vivaldi browser.
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Click the gear icon at the bottom right corner of the Vivaldi window to open Settings.
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Click Tabs in the Settings sidebar and then select Left or Right to enable vertical tabs.
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You can further customize Vivaldi’s tab feature here.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
If you like, you can also head over to the Themes tab in Settings and customize the theme. For me, I click Editor in the Themes page, disable “Accent from Page” and “Accent on Window”.
Close the Settings window.
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Adding and removing items
Now it’s time to add and remove items from the Tab bar. To do that, follow these steps.
1. Open the tab customization window
Vivaldi is one of the more customizable browsers on the market.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Right-click on the tab bar and select Customize Toolbar. Once that pop-up appears, make sure Tab Bar is selected from the drop-down.
2. Add and remove items
You should see several icons for different items, such as Workspaces, New Tab, Synced Tabs, Closed Tabs, Tab Button, Space, Flexible Space, Panel Width Space, and Separator. You can drag any of those items to the Tab bar. If there’s an item already on your Tab bar that you don’t want, click and drag it off the Tab bar to remove it.
You can add or remove whatever you want here.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Once you’ve finished, click Done to dismiss the Toolbar Editor.
One final thing you can do is customize the width of the vertical Tab Bar. To do that, click on the inner edge of the Tab Bar and drag it to the left to make it smaller or to the right to make it larger.
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You can customize the Tab Bar to be totally empty or filled with items. Either way, you can customize Vivaldi to look and perform exactly how you want. If you’re a themer like me, the ability to fully customize the Vivaldi Tab Bar is a big deal.