VivaldiCustomLauncher

Intercept executions of Vivaldi for Windows to add custom arguments and apply tweaks files

Usage

1. Download VivaldiCustomLauncher.exe from the latest release and save it somewhere, such as C:\Program Files\Vivaldi\VivaldiCustomLauncher.exe.
2. Download VivaldiCustomLauncher.reg.
3. Edit VivaldiCustomLauncher.reg to have the correct paths to VivaldiCustomLauncher.exe, depending on where you saved it.
4. Merge VivaldiCustomLauncher.reg into the registry.
5. Download SetDefaultBrowser.
6. Run SetDefaultBrowser.exe hkcu VivaldiCustomLauncher to make VivaldiCustomLauncher the default browser.
7. Update any shortcuts to vivaldi.exe to refer to this program instead, for example, shortcuts in the Start Menu.
8. If you pin Vivaldi to the taskbar, and you see double Vivaldi icons when it's running, then it's because VivaldiCustomLauncher.exe is a different executable than vivaldi.exe. To fix this, you can set the VivaldiCustomLauncher.exe shortcut's AppId to Vivaldi's AppId.
   1. Download Win7AppId1.1.exe.
   2. Open an elevated Command Prompt, otherwise this program may crash without administrator privileges.
   3. Get Vivaldi's AppId: Win7AppId1.1.exe "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Vivaldi.lnk"
   4. Set the VivaldiCustomLauncher shortcut to have the same AppId: Win7AppId1.1.exe "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\Vivaldi.lnk" <Vivaldi's AppId>.
9. Grant Modify permissions for the Vivaldi installation directory to your Windows user account.
10. Try opening a web page.
11. Tweaks and arguments will be applied.

What does it do?

• Includes a custom style sheet in the browser chrome to clean up the UI and make it more minimal.

• Includes a custom script to

  • add more keyboard shortcuts to the browser	Keyboard shortcut	Action
    Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy current page URL to clipboard
    Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V	Paste and Go in new tab
    Ctrl+E	Toggle visibility of extension buttons in toolbar
    Alt+H	Hibernate all unpinned background tabs in current window
    Alt+Z	Open history menu (backwards)
    Alt+X	Open history menu (forwards)

  • send the current tab's URL to my fork of the KeePass WebAutoType plugin using a localhost AJAX request so KeePass can autotype the correct username and password entry. This is done because the accessibility technique normally used by WebAutoType (MSAA) requires Web Accessibility to be turned on, which frequently makes Vivaldi 3 completely freeze for 20 seconds at a time. Even though the freeze was fixed in Vivaldi 4, the MSAA technique still only works half the time, whereas my plugin works every time.
  • add a button to the feed preview page so you can subscribe to the page in Inoreader

• Tweaks browser scripts to

  • make tabs stretch to fill the full width of the tab bar
  • close the current tab if you use the Back gesture and there are no more pages in the tab's history stack
  • reformat the status shown in the Downloads panel list items to look like 11 seconds, 11.87 MB/s, 17.85/124.71 MB and 17.85/124 MB - stopped to put more important information farther to the left so it doesn't get truncated by a narrow panel width
  • navigate to subdomains of the current URL by Ctrl+clicking on the subdomain (Vivaldi already offers this for parent paths, but not subdomains)
  • allow mail to be moved from any folder to any folder, which can be useful for marking messages as spam or not spam on your IMAP server. Destination folders are alphabetized, limited to subscribed folders only, and shown at the top level of the Move To Folder menu instead of in a submenu.
  • classify the "Junk E-mail" folder as a normal folder instead of spam, since I use that as a source of suspected spam on my mail server, not a sink of confirmed spam. This makes the Mark as Spam button work properly, and prevents mail folders from showing the wrong messages.
  • prepend https:// when you press Ctrl+Enter in the address bar, in addition to the default behavior of appending .com
  • hide incessant, useless status bar messages about checking mail and calendars, which are more annoying than beneficial
  • format data sizes using the widespread conventional base of 1024 instead of 1000 (1 kB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1024 kB, 1 GB = 1024 MB, etc)

• Copies Vivaldi's visual elements manifest XML file so that start menu tiles for this program look like Vivaldi's.

• Automatically reapplies all of the above tweaks if needed when the browser is restarted after installing Vivaldi or an update.

How does it work?

1. When you open an HTML page, web URL, or a shortcut to Vivaldi, this headless launcher program is started instead, because you updated all the associations and shortcuts for Vivaldi.
2. This program checks to see if the tweaks need to be applied, including after an update. If any of the tweaked files are out-of-date, they are automatically updated.
3. This program launches Vivaldi, passing in your original arguments.