I’ve just completed my internship at Vivaldi and am about to go back to University. I am currently studying towards a Bachelor Degree in Informatics: Language and Communication at the University of Oslo. This year will be my third and final year. At University I am learning to program and more, and it’s great to see how I can use all this knowledge in a work situation. Everything I’ve learned at University has been relevant for the work I did at Vivaldi. When you know how to program, complicated software bugs are easier to understand...

For every page you visit in Vivaldi a color is selected. Currently the engine takes two types of input—a favicon and meta theme-color. The ten most frequently used colors are extracted from the favicon, resulting in a list of up to 11 (including theme-colour). They are then rated by the following criteria: Is the contrast good enough? Is the color a midtone? Is the color saturated? A perfect score here is not very hard to get, and will give a color 150 points. Additionally, the top three colors are given a bonus multiplier. After all, it means they occur more frequently in the favicon, so they are more likely to be relevant. If present, the theme-color is given an additional bonus...

Summer interns can easily end up with the most boring jobs but not at Vivaldi. Interns here get the liberty to experiment and play around with different tasks every day. And not just play but implement. I spent the first weeks in the QA team getting to know the different products and functions. Towards the end, I started to dig into the code and learn JavaScript and React. Internships at Vivaldi last two months. Being here for this length of time means you get to know the product really well...

If you are like me, then all help is welcome to increase your productivity and focus. For me, it always has been a problem. While working on a dull task, I get distracted by everything around me. Checking emails, watching a youtube video, tinkering with software settings and configurations... Everything seems more fun than the task at hand. Only when I'm working on something that passionates me or rather annoys me, I can focus 100%...

One of the most exciting things about doing an internship is being able to apply what you’ve learned at University to actual projects and tasks. In my case, it was working on a mobile browser design which would be used by people all over the world. (Yes, you heard me right!) By the same token, you find out what skills you lack and need to work on when you go back to University after the end of the internship. For example, I realized the importance of markup language and style sheet language that I neglected in my studies. Many people have suggested that “visual and UX/UI designers need to understand HTML and CSS too”, but I had not found this necessary until working in the real industry, at Vivaldi. Now I know what to focus on in the coming semesters...

The latest Vivaldi snapshot improves scrollbars in our UI. We draw them ourselves instead of using the system ones, as we want to support theme colors. Styling scrollbars is a little tricky, since they hide in the shadow DOM. On Mac the scrollbar would be painted on top of the border surrounding text areas. When their corners were sufficiently round, they would clip it. Due to the limited styling options for scroll bars, it is not possible to set the width of the drag handle (called thumb in CSS). We worked around this limitation by letting the border be the same color as the background. We can set the border to be transparent, but that will defeat the purpose, as the background will be extended and painted in place of the border. The solution we ended up with is using the CSS property background-clip, which lets us clip the background to where the border starts. We use this in a couple of places to achieve complex designs without additional elements...

Earlier this year, one of my cousins reminded me about a game that we used to play on my old Amiga 500. The name of this game was “Atoms”, and it was a simple but somewhat addictive game created by Tom Kuhn that was given away on the coverdisk of an issue of the Amiga Format magazine back in 1993 (and based on an old 1989 Atari game of the same name). The original Atoms Amiga game Having been reminded of this game, I boldly claimed that I could probably write a clone of that game myself. Ideas were already forming in my head as to exactly how I was going to do this. The main thought that I had was that I wanted to do it purely using web technologies. Initially the project sat on the metaphorical back burner, but having been inspired by looking at some of the games that my niece had created in Scratch, I decided I had to get started. Progress was slow, but I had set myself a deadline that I should have this game in an at-least-playable state by the next time I saw my nieces in England. Naturally I had to first research how exactly the original game played since I hadn't played it myself in over 20 years. Unfortunately not having an Amiga to play it on I had to resort to internet research...

My name is Vilde and I am a third-year BA student in game programming at Kristiania University College in Oslo. This is my second month as an intern at Vivaldi and I am having a great time. I am learning something new every day and it is very inspiring to work with people who have so much experience. Here it’s easy to feel how passionate everyone is about Vivaldi. I am working in the QA team, testing new versions of the browser and bugs that are reported by users. While testing the browser, I’ve discovered some new and cool features that I want to share with you. But first things first. I’ve learned a lot about security during my weeks at Vivaldi. This is something everyone here takes very seriously. The