14 DAY TRIAL // Ruarí Ødegaard informs Softpedia today, July 14, 2016, about the availability of yet another snapshot towards the Vivaldi 1.3 cross-platform web browser, bringing more improvements to Linux support.
According to Mr. Ødegaard, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.3.537.5 has been released only a few days after the previous snapshot, version 1.3.534.3, mostly to improve the broken HTML5 proprietary media support on Linux kernel-based operating systems, which was made more robust on the Ubuntu Linux distribution but now works on Slackware and OpenSuSE, SLES, and derivatives.
Vivaldi has offered support for proprietary video (MP4 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and AAC) and audio (MP3) for a while now on Ubuntu via a package from the Chromium open-source project called chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra. But only certain versions of this package have been supported until now, which means that many users have reported broken proprietary media support.
"With today's snapshot we have made the system more flexible on Ubuntu by allowing the version of chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra package to vary a little more than before," says Ruarí Ødegaard. "In addition, we now look for suitable libraries in the chromium-ffmpeg package on OpenSUSE (from the Packman repository) and AlienBob's Chromium package on Slackware."
Arch Linux is supported as well from AUR
If you're using the Vivaldi web browser on the Arch Linux rolling release operating system, you should be aware of the fact that there's a package called vivaldi-snapshot-ffmpeg-codecs in AUR (Arch User Repository) that provides out-of-the-box proprietary media support. More details can be found in the official release announcement, and please note that Vivaldi Snapshot 1.3.534.3 introduced tab hibernation on Linux.
Also new in today's Vivaldi Snapshot 1.3.537.5 release is support for selecting a custom background image, better private window support on Mac OS X operating systems, and various other tab-related improvements. Download Vivaldi Snapshot 1.3.537.5 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website.