14 DAY TRIAL // We've been informed by Vivaldi's Ruarí Ødegaard about the general availability of the second Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.6 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Dubbed as Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.689.32, the second RC of Vivaldi 1.6 was released on December 13, 2016, just one day after the first Release Candidate version, which rebased the web browser on the open-source Chromium 55.0.2883.92 project and resolved a major regression for macOS users in regard to swiping through history.
While Vivaldi 1.6 RC1 also improved the generation of thumbnails for redirects and dynamically generated web pages, and added support for disabling the "Hide the mousecursor" setting, it looks like Vivaldi 1.6 RC2 is here to address that nasty issue some Linux and macOS users reported with missing passwords due to incorrect key storage usage.
"Since we have been using an incorrectly named, secure password store for several snapshots, the switch back to the correct one will result in the loss of passwords saved during your use of those snapshots. However, all old passwords stored prior to the broken builds, should now be accessible again," explained Ruarí Ødegaard, Linux QA and Testing at Vivaldi.
The final release of Vivaldi 1.6 is coming soon
We know that Vivaldi 1.5 was just released the other month, but the development of the cross-platform and free web browser never stops. The final release of Vivaldi 1.6 is expected soon, just before the Christmas holidays, when the development will take a well-deserved break. Vivaldi 1.6 RC2 also improves the tab notification feature to work directly with Google's Gmail email platform.
Below we've attached the changelogs for both RC1 and RC2 development releases of Vivaldi 1.6, and you can download the binary packages for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website if you want to take them for a test drive and report bugs. However, please try to keep in mind that these are pre-release versions, not suitable for day-to-day operations.