Vivaldi 8.3 lets you set ad blocking per site, from Light to Aggressive

Ad blockers usually force a choice between a clean page and a site that works. Vivaldi 8.3 tries to dodge that trade-off by letting you pick a different blocking level for every site, and it ships the change on desktop, Android and iOS at the same time.

The built-in Ad and Tracker Blocker has been rebuilt to cope with large filter lists and now comes with four presets. Light catches most known trackers and some ads. Strong and Aggressive go much further, and Vivaldi openly warns that they can break pages. Off does what it says. Clicking the shield in the address bar sets the level for the site you are on, so a video site can run on Aggressive while your bank stays on Light. Power users can build custom levels from their own block lists.

The company frames this as a stance rather than a feature. It says it has nothing against contextual ads that pay a site’s writers, only against the ones that follow you around the web, and it reminds readers that it is an independent, employee-owned European firm. Giving users the dial instead of a single on-off switch fits that pitch.

Desktop gets extras of its own. A vertical tab bar can now stay slim, showing only favicons, and expand when the cursor hovers over it, while pinned tabs sit in a compact grid at the top. Pasting a whole list of links into the address field opens each in its own tab, Copy Sanitized Link strips tracking parameters before sharing, and Reader Mode opens faster.

Extensions built around tab groups should also behave now, since Vivaldi supports Chrome’s Tab Groups API. On mobile, the update adds smarter tab stacks on Android and faster page loads on iOS with the blocker switched on.

Reported by Vivaldi (desktop), Vivaldi (mobile). Compiled with AI tools.