The new version of the Vivaldi web browser has just been launched and, unlike the usual, it is basically a disappointment, in which we find almost no new features, but an attempt to use it that already smells stale, like with Mastodon.

As we told you a few weeks ago, Vivaldi Social is a new instance of Mastodon managed by Vivaldi Technologies with which they tried to take advantage of the situation that Twitter is going through. And it’s because Mastodon was there for a long time, ignored by everyone, but now it’s getting attention.

“Almost all popular social networks are controlled by large companies,” notes Vivaldi Technologies. “Platforms like Mastodon, a distributed social media network based on open standards, are helping to break mainstream control. There is no owner, no surveillance capitalism, no tracking or profiling of users,” they add.

A commendable position if it had been granted months or years ago and not after smelling blood. For the rest, there are fundamental problems with Mastodon that are the same or worse than Twitter’s, and while there are advantages in terms of privacy and data control, Mastodon is far from a true alternative to Twitter. So thanks, but no.

However, if you think otherwise, you can enjoy yourself now Vivaldi integration with Mastodon right in the sidebar. Plus, signing up for Vivaldi Social is as easy as logging into the server and using your Vivaldi user credentials, the same ones you use to sync data between different browser installations.

Fortunately, the fact that Vivaldi 5.6 has almost no new features does not mean that there are none. At the functionality level, yes, there are only a few, although one of them is really interesting: set card groups. If you’re one of those people who use groups of tabs to organize their navigation and still find the bar small, now you can make it even smaller.

So the bookmark groups will shrink to the size of all other fixed bookmarks, i.e. icon size, but you will be able to open them by clicking. The good thing is that they respect the type of tab groups you use, because as you know, Vivaldi offers two different ways to do it.

The second new feature in terms of functionality that Vivaldi 5.6 adds is the ability configure panel buttons as if they were toolbars. They actually have the same name. In SIMplete, open the context menu at the edge of the panel and choose: “Edit > Customize Toolbar” to see what you can do with this change.

Other news of Vivaldi 5.6 include the restoration of the icons in the browser settings panel, as well as their slight rearrangement, the addition of another search engine that respects the privacy of the user, such as You, which is added to the list of default search engines Search; and for Vivaldi for Android reading list enhancements.