Why Vivaldi outshines all other browsers’ history management

As you might have read, I’ve migrated from Firefox to Vivaldi. This wasn’t an easy decision, as Vivaldi is a proprietary browser and I’d been using Firefox since the early days. Nevertheless, I made the switch and I haven’t looked back. Although the change wasn’t seamless, I found Vivaldi’s feature list to not only line up with Firefox, but best it in many ways.

One very clear area where Vivaldi is absolutely superior to all other browsers is how it makes managing your history not only easy, but intuitive. Sure, deleting entries within the Firefox browser is easy, but you have to know where to look to take care of the task (Hint: It’s in the Library–a feature which never made any sense to me). 

With Vivaldi, your browser history is right there, easily accessed from the sidebar, ready for you to use it, and in the using, you could revisit any site listed, you could search the history, or you can delete an entry.

SEE: Identity theft protection policy (TechRepublic Premium)

Why clear your history

Okay, this is a bit of a tricky subject. Why? Because the mere act of clearing one’s browser history might make someone think you have something to hide. Well, you might. For instance, you might visit particular internal sites that are only intended for certain employees to see. Those sites could contain sensitive and private information you don’t want leaked out. 

Or, you might have visited your bank site and you not only don’t want people knowing your login information, you might not even want them knowing which bank institution you use. 

Or, say you were shopping for a gift for someone and you don’t want them knowing where you were searching. 

In other words, there are a lot of non-nefarious reasons for wanting to manage your browser’s history. It’s not all about hiding your tracks from the FBI. Besides, if the FBI or the NSA wanted to view your browser history, they could always contact your ISP and have at it.

But if you ever share your computer with someone, there’s a good chance you’d rather keep your browsing history private. It really does boil down to that–privacy. 

Let me show you how easy it is to manage that history within Vivaldi.

What you’ll need

In order to follow along, you’ll need Vivaldi installed. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using (I’m working from Pop!_OS Linux), but you will at least need to have the browser collect some history–otherwise, there’d be nothing to manage.

How to access your Vivaldi history

On the left edge of the Vivaldi browser window, you’ll see a sidebar (Figure A).

Figure A

The History pane is activated by clicking the tiny clock icon in the sidebar. When you click that, it will reveal your Vivaldi browser history (Figure B).

Figure B

How to manage your Vivaldi history

The most obvious thing you can do with your history is search it. For that, select the time period you want to search from the top right drop-down and then type your search string. Say, for instance, there was a particular article on TechRepublic you wanted to go back to. Select a period of time that includes the date you visited the site and then type techrepublic in the search bar.

Below the search bar, you should see your results listed (Figure C). 

Figure C

Locate the article in question and double-click it to open the page.

But, what if you wanted to delete a particular page from your browser history? Simple. Via search, locate the page in question, right-click the entry, and select Delete (Figure D).

Figure D

You could also delete a block of sites by selecting those you want to remove (by holding down Ctrl while you select) and then clicking Delete from the right-click menu. You could also select every entry from that time period with the Ctrl+a keyboard combination and then clicking Delete from the right-click menu.

Of course, you can also manage how much of your history Vivaldi saves, from within Settings | Privacy. From the resulting window, select a time period from the Save Browsing History drop-down (Figure E).

Figure E

And that’s how simple it is to manage your browser history with Vivaldi. If you’re serious about your privacy, and you’re on the fence about making the switch to this browser, you can rest assured Vivaldi has your back with regards to your browsing history. 

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