Vivaldi workspaces: what it does and where it breaks down

A Vivaldi window with sixty tabs and five named workspaces looks organized. Whether it is organized depends on what the reader wanted out of it. For someone who mostly needed the screen to stop shouting, workspaces do the job on the first afternoon. For someone who is signed into two Google accounts, two Slack teams, and a client Notion, the same setup quietly fails in a way that takes weeks to notice, because nothing ever throws an error.

This is a map of the mechanism: what a workspace actually holds, every way to move between them, the one rule that catches people, and the boundary where the design hands the problem to something else.

What a workspace holds

Workspaces arrived with Vivaldi 6.0, announced in April 2023, and they group tabs by topic inside the same window. The control sits on the left side of the Tab Bar, or at the top of the list when the Tab Bar runs vertically. Creating one asks two questions: start empty, or move the tabs already open in this window into it, then give it a name and an icon.

The second route matters more than it looks. Selecting a handful of tabs, right clicking, and choosing Move Tabs, then Workspace, then Create Workspace with Selected Tabs turns an existing mess into a named set without closing anything. That is the path most people should use on day one, because it starts from the tabs that are actually open rather than from an idea of how work should be divided.

Inside a workspace, tabs behave normally. Tab Stacks work. Tab Tiling works, so a workspace can hold a two pane or four pane split without leaving the group. Tabs move between workspaces either by dragging them in the Window Panel, where source and destination folders can both be expanded, or through the Tab Bar context menu.

A workspace is a label on a set of tabs, not a container with its own storage. Nothing about cookies, extensions, or site permissions changes when the label changes. The tabs are still tabs in the same browser window, drawn by the same process, signed in as the same person. Everything later in this article follows from that one sentence.

Names, icons, and the option to hide both

Each workspace carries a name and an icon, and both can be changed later by right clicking the entry in the Workspaces menu. The icon is the part that earns its keep. With a unique icon per workspace, the names can be switched off entirely by right clicking the Workspaces button and turning off Display Workspace Name, which returns that strip of the Tab Bar to the tabs. On a laptop screen where horizontal space decides how many tab titles stay readable, that single setting is worth more than it sounds.

The menu itself can move. The Toolbar Editor, reached from the Vivaldi menu under View and Customize Toolbar, lists Workspaces in the Navigation Toolbar section and lets it be dragged somewhere else, which suits anyone running vertical tabs who would rather keep the control near the address field. New workspaces are added to the bottom of the list and can be dragged into a different order, and that order is what the numbered shortcuts follow.

Six ways to switch, and why that matters

Vivaldi ships more switching paths than most people ever use, and the one a reader picks decides whether workspaces feel fast or feel like furniture.

Method	How it is triggered	Best for
Workspaces menu	Click the button on the Tab Bar	Occasional use, browsing the list
Keyboard shortcut	Ctrl+Shift or ⌘ ⇧ plus the workspace number	Fixed sets in a fixed order
Quick Commands	F2 or ⌘E, then type the workspace name	Many workspaces, no fixed order
Scroll wheel	Hover the Workspaces button and scroll	Stepping through neighbours
Window Panel	Double click a tab under the workspace	Finding one known tab
Vivaldi menu	Window, then Other Workspaces and Tabs	Tabs open in another window

Quick Commands also accepts Next Workspace, Previous Workspace, and This Window as typed commands, and both of those can be bound to shortcuts or mouse gestures. Command Chains go one step further and let a single button open a set of pages and land in a specific workspace.

The numbered shortcut is the one that breaks first. It follows the order of the list, not the name, so reordering workspaces by dragging them in the menu silently changes what ⌘ ⇧ 3 does. Readers who rely on muscle memory should either freeze the order or switch to typing names in Quick Commands, where renaming and reordering cost nothing.

The one window rule

This is the behaviour that generates the most confusion, and it is documented plainly.

A workspace can be open in one browser window at a time. When switching to a workspace that is open in a different window, instead of opening the workspace in the current window, focus will be moved to the window where the chosen workspace is already open. Source: help.vivaldi.com

Read that as a design decision rather than a limitation and it stops being annoying. A workspace is bound to a window while it is open, so the same set of tabs cannot be shown in two places at once. Pressing the shortcut for a workspace that lives in the other window does not duplicate it. It jumps the reader to that window.

The practical consequence shows up on a large display or a two monitor desk. Someone who wants work tabs on the left screen and reference tabs on the right screen cannot do it with two workspaces shown side by side. Tab Tiling covers the split inside one window. Two windows covers the split across screens, but then each window holds its own workspaces and the reader is back to managing windows, which is the thing workspaces were supposed to replace.

What workspaces deliberately do not separate

Cookies, logins, extensions, history, and site permissions belong to the user profile, not to the workspace. That distinction is the whole answer to the most common expectation people bring to the feature.

Mechanism	What it groups	Separate cookies and logins	Listed as a synced data type
Workspace	Tabs inside one window	No	No
Tab Stack	Tabs inside a workspace or window	No	No
Browser window	Tabs and their layout	No	Open Tabs are synced
User profile	Cookies, history, extensions, bookmarks, settings	Yes	Needs a separate account per profile

Two workspaces in the same profile share one login state. Signing out of an account in the work workspace signs it out in the personal one, because there is only one cookie jar underneath. A second profile fixes that, and Vivaldi documents profiles as a way for several users to share one installation, each with a different set of extensions, bookmarks, Speed Dials, cookies, and history, plus its own look and shortcuts.

The cost of profiles shows up in sync. To sync profile data across devices, a separate Vivaldi account is currently needed for each profile. Someone who splits work and personal into two profiles is now maintaining two accounts, two encryption passwords, and two sets of settings. That is a real trade, and it is the reason many people leave everything in one profile and accept shared logins.

Sync has a second gap worth knowing. The published list of synchronised items covers Bookmarks and Speed Dials, some Settings, passwords, autofill, history, extensions, Web Apps, Reading List, Open Tabs, and Notes. Workspaces are not on that list. A carefully built set of workspaces on a desktop is not a thing that appears by itself on a laptop.

The parts that actually save time

Two features turn workspaces from decoration into something operational, and both sit slightly out of sight.

Workspace Rules

Under Settings, then Tabs, then Workspaces, Add New Workspace Rule sets a condition and a destination. The example in the documentation reads: if the URL contains bbc.com, open in News. From then on, a news link clicked in any other workspace moves itself to the News workspace when it opens.

This is the difference between a filing system a person maintains and one that maintains itself. A rule per domain for the three or four services that dominate a day covers most misfiling without any further thought. It also removes the small decision of where a new tab belongs, which is the decision people stop making after a week.

Hibernating a workspace

Splitting tabs into workspaces hides the count, and hidden counts grow. Right clicking a workspace in the menu offers Hibernate Tabs, which releases the memory held by every tab in that group while leaving the group intact. On a machine that starts swapping in the afternoon, hibernating the two workspaces that are not in use is faster than closing tabs and rebuilding them later.

One more item belongs here because it prevents a specific loss. Deleting a workspace also closes every tab inside it. Tabs can be recovered from Closed Tabs, but the safe order is to move anything worth keeping out first, then delete.

Where the model runs out

Workspaces solve the problem of too many tabs in one window. They do not solve the problem of too many identities in one application, and a reader who keeps feeling friction after a clean setup is usually hitting one of these three.

Notifications carry a site name and no account. A badge says Slack. Which Slack requires a switch to find out, and that switch is the interruption, not the message.

The application switcher lands on the browser. macOS treats Vivaldi as one target, so ⌘ Tab arrives at the window, after which the Workspaces menu has to be read and a choice made. One keystroke became three steps, repeated all day.

A crash takes everything with it. One application holding twelve services means one renderer problem, one stuck extension, or one update restart affects all of them at once. Tools that keep each web app in its own window trade some tidiness for that independence, and the Workspaces page lays out what that separation looks like in practice. For readers weighing the alternative shape, the list of services that run well as standalone windows on Supported apps is a faster way to judge fit than reading feature comparisons.

None of this makes workspaces a poor mechanism. It makes them a tab mechanism, which is what the documentation says they are.

What to change first

Pick the boundary that matches the actual complaint. If the complaint is visual noise, build three workspaces from tabs that are already open and add two Workspace Rules, then stop. If the complaint is that the wrong account keeps answering, workspaces will not fix it and a second profile will, at the cost of a second Vivaldi account for sync. If the complaint is that every service lives inside one fragile window, the shape to look at is a browser that gives each web app its own window, which is what SpaceDeck is built around.