Tame Your Tab Jungle With Vivaldi 6 Workspaces

Scott Gilbertson

About eight years ago I got an email from an old contact at Opera who said some ex-Opera designers and developers, including Opera's cofounder, Jon von Tetzchner, were launching a new web browser. Would I like to try an early beta? I did try it, and I never used another web browser again.

I've called Vivaldi the web's best browser, and that's still true for me, but somehow it manages to keep getting better. The recently released Version 6 comes with a new method of managing tabs dubbed Workspaces.

Vivaldi already had more ways to manage tabs than every other browser put together, so even I was wondering what Workspaces were going to be good for, but they turn out to be yet another great option to tame your tab jungle.

Groups of tabs are organized into Workspaces. Think of each Workspace as a virtual desktop for a specific task.

The usefulness of Workspaces is based on the premise that you have a lot of tabs open. I know I do, but every now and then I see someone else's screen, and I'll notice they have only a couple of tabs open. God bless you, if that's you. I want to be you. But I am in the middle of researching Norse exploration of North America for a homeschool lesson, trying to expand my collection of recipes of grilled meats on skewers, reading several 18th century sailing diaries on Archive.org, ordering parts for my Jeep, writing a post for my website, and reading several articles sent by friends. All told, I have 36 tabs open in Vivaldi as I type this.

That's just in my personal profile in Vivaldi. My work profile has 67 tabs open, as I am researching a dozen products that I'm in some stage of testing and writing reviews and guides about, including this one, natch.

My tabs would be absolute chaos and mayhem were it not for Vivaldi's tab-management tools. Keeping work and personal separate is possible in any browser, but Vivaldi's tab tools include the ability to cluster tabs in groups, tile multiple tabs into a single window, and now, with Vivaldi 6, put tabs in Workspaces.

I think of Workspaces as a bit like virtual desktops on your PC--in this case they're all part of the same web browser, they're just visually cordoned off from each other. That's an important distinction, by the way. Workspaces are not fully siloed, so, for example, you can't be logged in to different Gmail accounts in different Workspaces. Hence the virtual desktop metaphor.

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In my case, within my work profile I have a series of tabs related to Linux laptops, plus several tabs about sleeping pads, hard drives, solar panels, and other topics I research and write about. Then there are the core tabs I need for day-to-day work, like my email inboxes and all the publishing tools we use at WIRED.

Prior to Workspaces I would group all these tabs by topic in tab stacks. This works, but I have found that once a tab stack gets over about four tabs, it's tough to navigate. Now, with Vivaldi 6, I group these topic-related tabs into Workspaces. I set a keyboard shortcut so that I can cycle through them and easily jump between topics. When my editor asks me something about an upcoming guide, I can quickly jump to the workspace with that topic and find the answer. This workflow feels clearer and cleaner than it did before Workspaces, when I had to spend time hunting for tiny tabs within a stack.

Workspaces also make it easier to reduce the memory footprint of all those open tabs. Just as you would with an individual tab, or a tab stack, you can right-click and hibernate a whole Workspace. When you reopen your browser only the tabs in the current workspace load, which helps to keep memory usage down.

The power of Workspaces goes beyond how I use them, especially if you start creating custom Command Chains (which arrived in Vivaldi 4.1). For example, you could combine the command to switch workspaces with the command to switch themes and give all your workspaces a custom visual cue that signals which workspace you're in. The Vivaldi blog details how to do that and how to add custom icons to your toolbar to switch to specific workspaces.

As powerful as Workspace are, there are a couple of things I think would improve them. I'd like a way to make pinned tabs exist across all Workspaces. Keeping with the example above, I'd like to see my work email tab in every Workspace, which would be possible if you could somehow pin tabs to be outside Workspaces. It would also be great to have some kind of visual workspace switcher accessible via keyboard shortcuts, something like the tab switcher, so I could jump between workspaces. (It's possible to cycle through Workspaces with the keyboard, but when you have quite a few this can be a little slow.)

Rereading this I realize it sounds perhaps a little insane, but then I think Vivaldi is made for those of use who browse the web a bit more, um, thoroughly than normal people.

Even if you aren't quite at this level of nonsense, Workspaces can help add a little separation to your browser. Vivaldi's example includes separating work, shopping, and school. They're also good for keeping a web-based game hidden when the boss walks by (though if that's an issue, I might suggest new job is a better long-term bet). You could even use them something like Profiles for different family members if you didn't need to keep account logins separate.

Whatever organizational scheme you concoct, just know that it will be limited to the desktop; Workspaces are not available on the mobile version of the browser.