Vivaldi update integrates Qwant Search Engine

Vivaldi Technologies AS released a new version of the company's web browser Vivaldi today that integrates the privacy focused search engine Qwant in the browser.

Vivaldi Technologies AS pushed out an update to the stable channel of the web browser while work on the next major version 1.16 continues on the development channel.

The company stays true to its "a new release every three months or so" release schedule; Vivaldi 1.15 was released in April 2018, and while Vivaldi 1.16 has not reached release candidate status yet, the update of Vivaldi 1.15 does include support for the Qwant search engine.

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Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine much like Startpage or DuckDuckGo are (which Vivaldi includes by default as well).

Qwant promises that it "does not collect data about its users when they search", and that it does not use "any cookie nor any tracking device that" to track the browsing habits of users or create tracking profiles. The search engine does not put searchers into filter bubbles either as users from the same region will get the same set of results when they search for the same terms

You can select Qwant with a click on the small down arrow icon next to the search symbol in the searcb bar, or by opening the Search preferences vivaldi://settings/search/. There you can make Qwant the default search engine if you want and enable use as a private search engine.

Last but not least, you may also use the nickname q to run searches on Qwant from Vivaldi's address bar. Just type q searchterm to do so.

Vivaldi Technologies AS published three minor updates for version 1.15 of the browser since the release in April. The versions fixed or improved the following:

• [Regression] Grey Screen with Vivaldi Icon VB-39738
• [Regression] Mouse exit (onmouseleave) events being ignored in Vivaldi UI VB-38880
• [Regression] Search engine dropdown list blocked IME text selection VB-37068
• [Windows 10] Alt gestures do not work on web pages VB-39669
• [Windows 10][Media] Reddit Videos Freeze Vivaldi VB-31952
• Backported applicable Chromium 66 security patches
• Updated translations
• Crash when closing one of multiple windows VB-36171
• [Linux] Vivaldi will crash if the user installs a third party libffmpeg.so with unresolved dependencies VB-39825
• Backported applicable Chromium 67 security patches

You can read more about the new release on the official Vivaldi Team Blog.