Vivaldi, like any other derivative of Chromium, shares with it and with Chrome itself, in addition to the technical components on which the browser is built, many elements of its interface, although many of them remain hidden from the naked eye. It’s something that happens with, for example internal pages, preference pages, features and more; but it is very easy to jump the barrier and gain access to the original foundations.

Be careful: keep in mind that while Vivaldi isn’t the most stuck-in-its-ways derivative of Chrome, it’s not the furthest either. It would be somewhere between Brave and Microsoft Edge, meaning that while it doesn’t use most of Chromium’s internals by default, They are still there to be had, it’s just that if you don’t know them, it’s like they don’t exist.. With exceptions, of course.

But what do we mean by “internal pages” and what does it mean to use Chrome pages in Vivaldi? The truth is, it’s a bit of a hassle because… Let’s give examples: the extension page. If you look at the URI in the address bar, it will default to “vivaldi://extensions/«; in Chrome (or Chromium) it would be «chrome://extensions/«. In this case, moreover, the interface is the same.

There are others: the passwords page, which in Chromium / Chrome would be “chrome://password-manager/passwords” and in Vivaldi… It is not visible, although it is there: you can enter with the same URI and see how “chrome ” immediately changes to “vivaldi”. Another example would be bookmarks, whose default URI in Vivaldi (key input) would be “vivaldi://bookmarks”… But if you type the address but put “chrome://bookmarks” you’ll find something different .

The bookmarks example is really paradigmatic, because one of Vivaldi’s features is its bookmark manager. Now for a different taste, and although – perhaps with the exception of passwords – it doesn’t seem likely that a Vivaldi user would prefer to use the native Chromium tools… There is a way that all of this can be somewhat automated: Go to “vivaldi://experiments/” and check the first option “Enable Chrome Sites”. The change will be automatic.

Of course, some of these internal pages will require specific bookmarks to point to them, as there are browser buttons (bookmarks, history…) that will continue to point to their own functions. Use cases? It is up to you. What if it doesn’t convince you? You uncheck this option and nothing happened here.