u/levgel

The now playing box in Arc's sidebar was among the only things I was missing after moving to Vivaldi, and it has no equivalent.

So I built it with Claude.

What carries over from Arc

• Now-playing block pinned in the sidebar, under the tabs
• Artwork, title, artist; play/pause, prev/next, click-to-seek
• Long titles scroll instead of truncating
• Per-tab mute, and dismissing a player without closing the tab

What doesn't

• It is a panel docked into the tab bar, not a native part of the sidebar, so it sits in a fixed slot at the bottom rather than floating like Arc's
• Prev/next work by driving the site's own buttons (YouTube, YouTube Music, Spotify, SoundCloud), because mediaSession handlers cannot be triggered from outside the page. Anywhere else they fall back to a 10s seek
• DRM players like Netflix will list and mute, but will not seek

Built and tested on Vivaldi 8.1.4087.62, macOS 15.7. It leans on Vivaldi's internal CSS selectors, so a UI redesign can break it; the repo ships the CDP script I used to find them, so repairs are mechanical.

https://github.com/levz0r/vivaldi-media-panel