Hello, Habr!
The past year was full of the most unexpected events and surprises, both pleasant and not so, and one of such innovations, which has become almost the norm in our life, is remote work. No, the remote appeared long ago, when Internet speeds made it possible to avoid office jail without any problems, but then it was associated with the tropics, the beach and unhurried programming to the rustle of ocean waves running on the snow-white sand. It's no secret that for many of us this work style was a pleasant dream. Well, dreams come true - now we all, with a few exceptions, work remotely. True, the deletion of version 2020 turned out to be much more severe than we imagined it. But is it really a problem if you have handy tools at hand?
The art of self-organization
It would seem - what's so hard about working from home? But if your workspace mixes production tasks and all sorts of distracting activities like watching videos, online books or playing games, then after a while you will be surprised to notice that your work has somehow slowed down, and all your attention has shifted to a completely non-working area. ... And if you still try hard to keep up with both, then you really won't watch the movie, and you will probably make a couple of mistakes in your current tasks. To avoid this, it is better to immediately distinguish between work and rest. To do this is quite simple - just create two profiles in which all bookmarks, settings and even appearance will be different, while maintaining, so to speak, social distance from each other. And if your work profile motivates you to solve production problems:
Then a home profile will be able to create a comfortable atmosphere for a quality rest:
Yes, you can switch between profiles very easily, but such a distinction really helps to avoid temptations and first work, and only then calmly rest with a feeling of pleasant satisfaction from timely and well-done work. But in order to complete work tasks faster and free up more time for rest, the browser has a lot of other useful features.
Everything at hand
A computer is a universal tool, so we are used to performing a variety of tasks on it. You can, of course, use a lot of specialized programs and keep them active on the desktop, constantly switching between windows and wasting precious time, but there is a better way. For example, all mail can be viewed in the built-in mail client, which will instantly inform you about the receipt of fresh messages and allow you to quickly respond to an important letter:
In the Vivaldi browser, the built-in mail client has appeared quite recently and is currently undergoing final testing, so you need to enable it on the page experimental functions vivaldi: // experiments and restart the browser. After that, the mailer icon will appear on the sidebar of the browser.
In the same place, on the sidebar, you can place other means of communication with colleagues. In our company, the main one is Slack, which fits perfectly into the browser in the form of a web panel:
Messaging services are also conveniently placed on the side panel - for example, WhatsApp, which allows you to keep in constant touch with partners and third-party testers or translators.
There are also pages that seem to be important, but you don't really want to give them a full-fledged tab. They also feel great "on the side" - like, for example, the status page for all Vivaldi services:
Work on bugs
And we must not forget about working on bugs - you can always see in one click how things are going with the fixes, and all in the same place - on the sidebar:
In general, if we talk about working with the database of bug reports, then one of the most frequent actions, with related is search. Having received, for example, information from a user on a forum about a problem, the first step is to check whether there have already been similar complaints from other users. It is very easy to do this by adding the search for bug reports to the list of search engines. After that, it is enough to select the text and send it to BTS for review through the context menu.
But the clearest idea of how efficiently you can work in a browser is given by the function of placing pages in one window. For example, you can simultaneously keep in front of your eyes a bug report, a translation system, and a source file where you need to find the problem line:
And this is only a small part of all the functions and options that speed up and simplify the production process. Not even talking about things that professionals need, such as working with keyboard shortcuts, quick commands, spatial navigation. And if you, like in our company, often have all kinds of meetings and discussions, then you cannot do without the built-in calendar, where you can enter all regular and one-time events so as not to miss them, carried away by the next bug fix. The calendar is turned on together with the mail client on the experimental functions page ( vivaldi: // experiments). And if you urgently need to show your colleague a layout of a new page, then you do not need to run after him all over the office - you know that he is at home, like you, so you just take a screenshot of the entire page and send it to your colleague in any convenient way. It is for such cases that the corresponding function was added to the browser.
Now a particularly attentive reader may ask: excuse me, but what does all these great features have to do with remote work? After all, they are all available when working in the office. That's right, available. But let's simulate the situation. So you come to the office at 9 in the morning and, thanks to all these wonderful features of the browser, you have done all the usual current work, say, before lunch. What do you do for the remaining half day? That's right - to continue working on new tasks, because you cannot leave ahead of time and it is unlikely that your bosses will allow you to do non-work. But now you are at a distance, and, having completed the standard amount of work, you can already switch the profile to home and go about your personal affairs. So Vivaldi allows you to more fully experience this plus of remote work.
Range - unlimited
Probably, each of us at least once got into such a situation when you are sitting at an important meeting, listening to the speaker's presentation, and this has lasted for the second hour. And so I want to pour myself strong coffee so that a fascinating story, filled with a mass of wonderful numbers, does not drive you into a deep, healthy sleep. It should be noted that when working remotely, it is much easier to disconnect - you are sitting in your favorite soft chair wrapped in a warm blanket. But then you have more freedom. With wireless headphones, you can safely walk around the apartment without distraction from listening to your presentation. Just do not forget to put one of the headphones somewhere halfway to the kitchen - so that the connection will not suddenly be interrupted (and do not say that you have never done that!).
But what if you need to leave on business, and before lunch you need to view all the latest news on your topic? This is where mobility comes to the rescue - more precisely, the Vivaldi mobile browser. When synchronization between mobile and desktop versions is enabled, you will not only get all your usual bookmarks, passwords and other important data, but you can also easily transfer current affairs between devices - all active tabs are synchronized between browsers too. So you open the necessary pages in the desktop browser, and you can finish reading them on the bus or in a taxi while you are traveling on business:
By the way, it also works in the opposite direction:
And in the same way, on the road, you can create notes, write down some fresh ideas, adding screenshots of pages to them - all this, thanks to synchronization, will immediately be transferred to the desktop version, you do not have to transfer this data manually.
In general, after familiarizing yourself with the huge set of built-in Vivaldi functions, it may seem that the developers guessed something and prepared the ideal browser for remote work in advance. Well, to some extent, that's true. Only to be more precise, we are creating a browser, trying to significantly simplify and make it more convenient to work on the network for users, at their requests and wishes, covering the maximum possible set of familiar and often demanded functions. Everything that is important should be at hand. And we try to follow this simple rule. Thank you for helping us build the Vivaldi browser, and we hope that the new features will make you happy and useful under any circumstances.
Photo by Arsalan Noorafkan used in this article