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Vivaldi 7.9 Launches With Auto‑Hide UI and ‘Follower Tabs’ for Power Users

Early hands-on reports highlight a cleaner, more immersive interface with some usability tradeoffs.

Overview

  • UI Auto-hide clears the tab bar, address bar, toolbars, and status area, restoring them when the cursor hits a window edge, and it can be set to hide specific elements or the full chrome.
  • Controls live under Settings → Appearance → UI Auto-hide, with quick toggles via a status-bar icon and platform shortcuts reported as Command‑F10 on Mac and Ctrl+F11 noted in PCWorld’s testing.
  • 'Follower Tabs' let users open links as a tiled follower alongside the source page, routing subsequent links to that pane to preserve context during deep dives.
  • PCWorld’s hands-on found the immersive UI helpful but said hiding tabs and the URL bar can feel disorienting and that Follower Tabs may need iterative polish.
  • The release also upgrades Vivaldi Mail with a pop‑out composer window, a rich‑text/plain‑text toggle, lower inbox memory use, improved mailing‑list handling, and the ability to save emails to disk, and it is available free for macOS, Windows, and Linux.