Vivaldi Technologies released version 8.3 of its desktop browser on November 5, 2026, rebuilding the built-in Ad and Tracker Blocker around three blocking strengths that can be set separately for every website. The same blocker reached Vivaldi for Android and iOS that day. Alongside it, the release lets users assemble custom blocking levels from their own choice of filter lists, adds a command that removes tracking parameters from copied links, and gives the vertical tab bar two new layout options.

Vivaldi published release posts for desktop and mobile on its blog on November 5 and repeated the announcement in a message to its users on November 6. The company presented the update as a dispute with tracking-based advertising rather than with advertising itself. "We aren't against respectful advertising. A contextual ad that matches the page you're reading, and doesn't follow you around afterwards, is a fair way for a site to pay its writers," according to Vivaldi. "The ads we object to are the ones that track and profile you."

In Short

Vivaldi, a small European web browser, rebuilt its ad and tracker blocker so people can switch it off or pick Light, Strong or Aggressive blocking, and choose a different setting for each website. That matters to websites and advertisers, because ads and measurement tags that load in other browsers may not load for Vivaldi users who turn the setting up. The update also adds a way to strip tracking codes out of a link before you share it, so some shared links will no longer carry the codes marketers use to see where a visitor came from.

Three strengths and an off switch

The rebuilt blocker ships with four default levels. Vivaldi lists them as Off, which "turns the built-in blocker off completely"; Light, which "blocks most known trackers and some ads"; Strong, which "blocks more trackers and ads, sites may break"; and Aggressive, which "blocks almost all trackers and ads, sites may break."

The wording in the product differs slightly from the announcement text. In the onboarding screen Vivaldi showed with the release, headed "Pick your level of protection", Strong "Blocks more ads" and warns that "Sites might break occasionally", while Aggressive warns that "Sites might break frequently." Light is the highlighted option on that screen, which tells users that "The Ad and Tracker Blocker can be adjusted any time in settings." Vivaldi's announcement does not state which level new installs receive by default, or whether existing users keep their previous blocker settings after the update.

What changed underneath? "For this release we have given the Ad and Tracker Blocker an extensive rebuild to handle large filter lists more efficiently," according to Vivaldi, which also gave the feature "an updated design and new labels." The company published no desktop benchmark, memory figure or list size to quantify that efficiency gain. Its separate mobile release post gives one number: on iOS, the browser is up to 12 times faster with the blocker on. The post does not describe how that was measured.

The level chosen during onboarding or in settings applies to every site. That is the starting point, not the end of the configuration.

One level per website

"Ad blocking shouldn't be all or nothing," according to Vivaldi. "Levels really pay off when you set them per site." The company's own examples sketch how users are expected to split the web: Aggressive for a DJ set on YouTube, "without ads breaking your beat"; Light for a bank, so "every form works as expected"; and a lower setting for "the small independent site you trust and whose ads you're happy to see."

The per-site control sits behind a shield icon in the Address Bar. Clicking it sets a level for the site currently open, and "Vivaldi remembers your choice, so each site loads the way you decided," according to the announcement. The exceptions table in Vivaldi's Privacy and Security settings lists sites row by row, bbc.com among them, with a separate Same Origin Blocking setting for each entry.

For publishers, the arithmetic changes in a subtle way. Under a single global setting, a site's ads either load for a given user or they do not. Under per-site levels, the outcome depends on a judgment each user makes about each domain. A publisher that a user trusts may see its ads restored; a video platform that a user finds intrusive may see nearly everything removed. Vivaldi frames this as a reward for restraint, with the company stating that it supports contextual advertising that does not follow readers from site to site. That model, ads matched to the page rather than the person, is the one form of advertising the announcement singles out as acceptable.

Custom levels and the lists behind them

"If you are particularly interested in the topic, we've also added the option to create 'custom' levels," according to Vivaldi. "In these levels you configure everything yourself, giving you full control over which blocklists are used." A custom list can be added from a remote URL or from a local file. On mobile, Vivaldi's release post says iOS supports both routes, while Android accepts lists by URL only.

The settings dialog Vivaldi displayed shows what a custom level contains. Under a "New Blocking Level" heading, each level gets a name and a description, and two tabs: Blocking Options and Additional Rule Lists. The Blocking Options tab groups ready-made lists into categories:

  • Privacy: Anti-Facebook List, DuckDuckGo blocking list, EasyPrivacy
  • Advertisements: ABP filters, Adblock Warning Removal List, EasyList, Peter Lowe's Ad and tracking server list
  • Cookie Warnings: Easylist Cookie List
  • Annoyances: EasyList - Chat Widgets, Fanboy's Annoyance List, Fanboy's Notifications Blocking List
  • Social Media Widgets: Fanboy's Social Blocking List

Two further switches carry more technical weight. Strict Content Blocking, under Document Blocking, is described in the dialog as allowing "blocking rules to block certain webpages entirely." Block Content from Same Domain, under Same Origin Blocking, allows "blocking rules to block content from the same domain." In the example level Vivaldi showed, named "My custom blocking", the ticked boxes were the DuckDuckGo list, EasyPrivacy, ABP filters, EasyList, Peter Lowe's list, Fanboy's Notifications Blocking List and Strict Content Blocking. Same-domain blocking was left unticked.

The same-domain option bears directly on measurement run from first-party subdomains. Server-side tagging setups typically move tracking requests onto a subdomain of the advertiser's own site precisely so that they are not treated as third-party traffic. Filter list maintainers have already started naming those subdomains. PPC Land reported in May that ad blockers are now targeting server-side GTM subdomains by name, with AdGuard's first-party tracking list holding more than 3,400 rules, including 83 entries matching the "gtm." pattern and 42 matching "sgtm.", and EasyPrivacy's site-specific file running to 2,378 lines. Vivaldi does not say how its same-domain option treats subdomains, and the announcement does not disclose which lists sit behind Light, Strong or Aggressive.

Desktop and mobile in step

"The new Ad and Tracker Blocker is also available for Vivaldi on Android and iOS today, so your protection looks and works the same way on your laptop, your phone and your tablet," according to Vivaldi. The levels, per-site controls and custom levels carry over, with the Android restriction on file-based lists the one documented difference. Vivaldi's blog lists the stable builds as 4191.30 for desktop, 4192.48 for Android and 4193.19 for iOS.

Mobile parity has been a recurring theme in the company's release history. PPC Land covered Vivaldi 7.5 for Android and iOS in July 2025, a release built on Chromium 138 that enabled Reader View by default.

Vertical tabs get two additions

"Long before vertical tabs were a talking point in our industry, they were introduced as an option in Vivaldi," according to the company, which said its 8.0 update earlier this year "introduced a redesign that really gave the vertical tabbers a sought-after update." The announcement does not give the 8.0 release date.

Version 8.3 adds Expand Tab Bar on Hover. The vertical tab bar can stay slim, showing only favicons, and widens to show full page titles when the cursor moves over it, then collapses again when the cursor leaves. It works with the tab bar on either the left or the right of the window.

The second addition places pinned tabs in a compact grid at the top of a vertical tab bar, side by side rather than one per row. "If you instead prefer the 'old' way with each pinned tab taking a row each, there is obviously a setting, this is Vivaldi," according to the announcement. Vivaldi's blog puts that setting under Settings, Tabs, Tab Features, Pinned Tabs, Show Pinned Tabs at Full Width.

Tab management has been the company's most consistent line of development. In January, Vivaldi 7.8 shipped advanced tab tiling while larger browsers concentrated on AI features, and in August 2024 Vivaldi 6.9 added tab and tab stack renaming.

Four smaller changes

The release lists four further additions:

  • Paste and Go for multiple links: a list of URLs pasted into the Address Field opens as one tab per link.
  • Copy Sanitized Link: "removes tracking parameters from a link before it is copied, so shared links carry only the page itself," according to Vivaldi.
  • Faster Reader Mode: opens faster and scrolls more smoothly.
  • Tab Groups API support: "extensions built on Chrome's Tab Groups API now work in Vivaldi."

The last item is a reminder of the browser's foundations. Vivaldi runs on Chromium, the open-source code behind Chrome, and extension compatibility with Chrome's APIs determines how much of the Chrome Web Store catalogue works inside it. The announcement does not state which Chromium version 8.3 uses.

Why the release matters to advertisers

Copy Sanitized Link is the change most likely to show up in campaign data. Paid search depends on parameters appended to landing page URLs: Google's auto-tagging adds the GCLID to every ad click, and other platforms append their own identifiers. When a visitor copies such a URL and shares it, the identifier usually travels with it. Vivaldi's command cuts it off at the clipboard.

The scope is narrower than browser-level stripping. Vivaldi describes the feature as acting on links a user copies, not on links a user clicks, so the original ad click arrives intact. The announcement does not list which parameters Vivaldi treats as tracking parameters, which leaves open whether campaign tags such as UTM parameters are removed along with click identifiers.

Other browsers have moved further. PPC Land reported in April that Safari is quietly killing the GCLID in Private Browsing, which the report estimated at up to 20 percent of sessions. In July, PPC Land reported that the Safari 27 developer beta adds parameters from Threads, YouTube and X to Link Tracking Protection, a feature that sits alongside Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Google's analytics tooling has started to flag the damage: a diagnostic added to Google Analytics on July 30, 2026 warns when Google Ads clicks lose paid attribution because GBRAID and gad_ parameters are stripped, with affected sessions showing up as "(not set)" or "organic".

Built in rather than bolted on

Vivaldi's blocker is part of the browser, not an extension. That distinction has gained weight. Chrome's transition to Manifest V3 forced the removal of uBlock Origin, which had more than 31 million users, from the Chrome Web Store in 2025. Extension-based blockers also carry their own privacy risk: research from LayerX published in April 2026 found that at least 82 browser extensions reserve the right to sell user data, including eight ad blockers with a combined install base above 5.5 million users. The browser extension permissions those tools request are what make such collection possible.

Browser makers have responded by building blocking in. DuckDuckGo began blocking YouTube ads by default on iPhone, Windows and Mac on July 8, 2026, drawing on uBlock Origin's community filter lists. Brave, which blocks ads by default and sells its own through Brave Ads, reached 109 million monthly active users in February 2026.

Filter lists decide what disappears

Whatever level a Vivaldi user selects, the decisions about which domains and scripts to block are largely made by the volunteer and commercial maintainers of lists such as EasyList and EasyPrivacy. The same lists sit behind most major blockers. The isblocked.fyi tool, covered by PPC Land in June, checks 22 filter lists from uBlock Origin, Brave, AdGuard and AdBlock Plus daily, so that site owners can see whether their tags are listed. Custom levels in Vivaldi widen the field further, because any list hosted at a URL can be loaded.

How much traffic is affected? Estimates vary. In a July interview, Ad-Shield's co-CEO said that between 60 and 80 percent of ad-blocked traffic is invisible to the sites receiving it, with ad-blocked traffic estimated in the same discussion at between 10 and 30 percent of all web traffic.

The courts are watching blockers

The release landed three days after a fresh legal challenge to ad blocking in the United States. On November 2, The New York Times and three other papers sued Brave in federal court in Manhattan. Alongside copyright claims over AI answers, the complaints include an unjust enrichment count under New York law aimed at Brave blocking the papers' ads while selling its own. That count does not ask whether blocking itself is lawful, only who keeps the revenue.

In Germany, the question of legality has reopened. The Federal Court of Justice on July 31, 2025 revived Axel Springer's lawsuit against Adblock Plus maker Eyeo, overturning a Hamburg ruling and sending the copyright argument back to the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg. The German Federal Court of Justice had rejected Axel Springer's competition-law claims against the blocker in April 2018.

Vivaldi's announcement describes no ads sold in place of the ones it blocks, the conduct at the centre of the unjust enrichment count against Brave. A copyright theory of the kind under review in Hamburg, by contrast, is aimed at blocking as such.

Scale

Vivaldi's direct effect on ad inventory is limited by its size. PPC Land put the browser at about 3.5 million active users when covering version 7.8 in January, a small fraction of Brave's audience. Chrome and Safari dominate in Europe: the EU General Court, in a ruling PPC Land covered in September, cited figures showing Chrome with 59 percent of European page views in December 2022, Safari with 22 percent and Microsoft Edge with 5.8 percent.

Vivaldi's pitch leans on that independence. "We cannot repeat this often enough: Vivaldi is an independent employee-owned European company. That means we don't answer to advertisers or a VC firm pushing features that benefit them instead of you," according to the company. "We don't collect data, we just want to make a great browser that helps you explore the web." It also opened its announcement with a jab at larger rivals: "As you know, we aren't part of the Big Tech oligarchy, and our business doesn't depend on knowing all about you to predict when you are ready to buy a new toothbrush."

The larger browsers have taken different paths on tracking. Google retired most of its Privacy Sandbox technologies in October 2025, citing low adoption, while Mozilla said in November 2025 that Firefox 145 cut fingerprinting trackability nearly in half for users in Private Browsing and Strict mode.

What the announcement leaves out

Several points that matter to advertisers and publishers are not addressed in Vivaldi's announcement or its release posts:

  • No benchmark, filter list size or memory figure for the desktop rebuild.
  • Which filter lists make up the Light, Strong and Aggressive presets.
  • Which level new installs receive, and whether existing users' previous blocker settings carry over.
  • Which URL parameters Copy Sanitized Link removes.
  • Whether Block Content from Same Domain applies to subdomains.
  • The Chromium version underlying 8.3, and the release date of 8.0.
  • How Vivaldi funds itself; the announcement describes what the company does not depend on, not what it does.

Vivaldi's marketing department, by the company's own account, called 8.3 "a really on-brand release". The description fits a release built around user control, though most of the technical specifics sit in the browser's settings rather than in the announcement.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Vivaldi Technologies, the independent, employee-owned European maker of the Vivaldi browser, with consequences for publishers, advertisers and ad tech vendors whose ads and tags load in it.

What: Vivaldi 8.3 rebuilds the built-in Ad and Tracker Blocker with four default levels (Off, Light, Strong, Aggressive), per-site settings through a shield icon in the Address Bar, and custom levels built from selectable or user-supplied filter lists, including options to block whole pages and same-domain content. The release also adds Expand Tab Bar on Hover, a pinned tab grid for vertical tabs, Paste and Go for multiple links, Copy Sanitized Link, a faster Reader Mode and support for Chrome's Tab Groups API.

When: Released on November 5, 2026 for desktop, Android and iOS, and announced again to users on November 6, 2026.

Where: Worldwide on Vivaldi for desktop, with the same blocker on Android and iOS; Android accepts custom lists by URL only.

Why: Vivaldi says it objects to ads that track and profile people, not to contextual advertising, and wants users to decide site by site how much of the web gets through. For the advertising industry, the release adds another browser where tracking tags, ad slots and click parameters depend on user-selected filter lists, at a time when ad blocking faces renewed legal challenges in the United States and Germany.