Vivaldi has become my default web browser on both the Linux desktop and my Android devices. It’s fast, reliable, secure, and offers a number of features I’ve grown to depend on. One such feature, found only on the mobile version of Vivaldi, is the new Page Actions. With Page Actions you can configure a website for enhanced accessibility or readability. Maybe you’re looking to tweak your own site’s CSS and want to quickly enable the CSS debugger. Or, maybe you just want a site to appear different than the default. With Page Actions you can do just that.

What kind of configurations can you set for a site? Currently, Vivaldi includes the following options:

• CSS Debugger

• Black and White

• Grayscale

• Intensify (adds saturation and contrast to images)

• Invert (adds saturation and contrast to the images)

• Obscure (hides content by blurring the page)

• Sepia

• Fonts Monospace (forces the use of a monospace font) 

• Page Minimap (shows a small overview of the page)

• Skewed Images (forces text to be displayed in a monospace font) 

• Transform 3D (distorts the whole page)

• Transitions Forced (enhances transitions)

• Transitions Removed (disables transitions)

The only issue with Page Actions is that not all of them function as expected on every site, so your mileage may vary, depending on the site you visit. For many sites, some of these Page Actions have a pretty strong effect. You might find a site that’s hard to read because the developers haven’t made it mobile friendly. You could switch on the Fonts Monospace Page Action and, suddenly, the page is much easier to read.

No matter why you use it, Page Actions is definitely something you want to try. Let me show you how.

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What you’ll need

The only thing you’ll need is the most recent update of Vivaldi running on Android. There’s nothing more to install and nothing to purchase. 

With Vivaldi ready to go, let’s see how Page Actions work.

How to use Page Actions

Page Actions are really quite easy to use. Open Vivaldi on Android, navigate to a page you want to change, and tap the Vivaldi button near the top-right. From the menu, tap Page Actions (Figure A).

Figure A

A new sidebar will slide out from the right to display all of the available Page Actions (Figure B).

Figure B

Locate the Page Action you want to apply to the site and tap the On/Off slider until it’s enabled–you can apply as many Page Actions as you like. Once you’re done, tap the X in the upper-right corner to dismiss the sidebar and reveal what that page now looks like (Figure C).

Figure C

If the site doesn’t look the way you want it, open the Page Actions sidebar and make more adjustments. The Page Actions you’ve enabled will apply to every page on the site and will remain until you either disable the actions or close the tab. 

The caveat

You knew it was coming–every piece of software suffers from a caveat or two. With Vivaldi Page Actions, the only downside is that, when you close the site you’ve configured with Page Actions, the next time you visit the site, you’ll have to re-enable the options you originally chose. That’s right, Page Actions doesn’t remember your options from visit to visit. It would be nice if the developers would make it such that users could save their Page Action choices.

However, that’s a very small nit to pick, especially given how helpful Page Actions might be to users looking to make a website as readable as possible. If you’ve been looking for a reason to make the switch to Vivaldi, Page Actions might be just that feature. Give it a go and see if it doesn’t win you over.

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