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Vivaldi 4.0 launches with built-in email and calendar clients, RSS reader – TechCrunch:
Vivaldi has always been one of the more interesting of the Chromium-based browsers, in no small part thanks to its emphasis on building tools for power users in a privacy-centric package, but also because of its pedigree, with Opera's outspoken former CEO Jon von Tetzchner as its co-founder and CEO. Today, the Vivaldi team is launching version 4.0 of its browser and with that, it's introducing a slew of new features that, among many other things, include the beta of new built-in mail, calendar and RSS clients, as well as the launch of Vivaldi Translate, a privacy-friendly translation service hosted on the company's own servers and powered by Lingvanex.
Vivaldi isn't new to email clients. The company has long offered a webmail service, for example. But building an offline email client into the browser — as well as a calendar client — almost feels like a return to the early days of browsers, like Netscape Navigator and Opera, when having these additional built-in features was almost standard. Von Tetzchner argues that for a lot of browser vendors, doing away with those features was about steering users into certain directions (including their own webmail clients).
"We've chosen to say, 'okay, we don't want to have the business model decide what we do. We rather focus on what the users want.' And I think there's a significant value [in a built-in email client]. Most all of us use email — at varying levels, some of use it a lot, some less, but everyone basically has at least one email account," he said. "So having a good client for that, that's kind of where we're coming from. And, I mean, we obviously did a lot of those things at Opera — some of them we didn't — and we are filling a gap with what Opera used to be doing. And now at Vivaldi, we are doing those things, but also a lot more. We never did a calendar at Opera."
(...) As of now Vivaldi isn't profitable. It generates some revenue from preinstalled bookmarks and search engine partnerships. But von Tetzchner argues that Vivaldi just needs to increase its user base a bit more to become a sustainable company. He seems comfortable with that idea — and the fact that its per-user revenue is relatively low. "We've done this before and we've seen this work. It takes time to build a company like ours," he said. "I hope people are liking what we're building — that's kind of the feel I get — people are really liking what we're building. And then kind of gradually, we'll get enough users to pay the bills and then we take it from there."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Subsentient on Thursday June 10 2021, @02:39AM (2 children)
I'm afraid I no longer trust a browser that isn't entirely open source. Otter browser could use the help, it's a nice Opera clone and it's entirely FOSS.
Vivaldi, if you want users like me, which I suspect you don't (too small a percentage), you need to open source it. You can still make money with it, look at Firefox.
In this day and age, something like a browser needs to be open source at a minimum, otherwise you're taking a big risk, and I think us soylentils have all been burned enough times.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:24AM (1 child)
That's the first I've heard of Otter Browser. Might keep an eye on that one, since Pale Moon is dropping Mac support.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:44PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:57AM (16 children)
I have not used it in roughly 2 years but I liked it, it is a decent browser, it does have some power user settings, and it supports linux. I stopped using it and I currently use the brave browser for most of my surfing needs because of the privacy. (I do not use brave rewards.)
tbh, what interests me most is the email client. I am not really happy about it being shoehorned on to the browser (though I do understand with the amount of email today that is html based.) But if it is a decent client, that could get me back to vivaldi.
I currently use Thunderbird for email. And I really do not like it... I use it because there is very little competition in the market now for client side email seeing how micro$oft scoops up the majority of the windows side of things and a lot of email has gone web based. There seems to be a dearth of clients that can handle multiple client accounts well with a clean UI. I have tried some that seem to choke on my email (multiple domains and accounts totaling about 2GB of data.)
Even if it is part of the browser now, I can overlook that if it works better than thunderbird.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @05:52AM
I like both Evolution and Kmail (Kontakt) and switch between them every couple of years or so. Thunderbird can't show multi-line in message list and didn't know natively DAV the last time I looked. Instead it included a joke of an XMPP client... Let's say Thunderbird is reasonable though - that makes 3 times more email clients to choose from than browsers, where only Firefox is reasonable (considering privacy and usability).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Thursday June 10 2021, @07:31AM (13 children)
Don't get me started. Back in the day when I used Windows it was Pegasus Maill, but they just stopped evolving and I went Apple, so dropped them. I finally got fed up with Gmail a few years ago and went hunting for a new, local, email client.
I wound up with Thunderbird on Linux even though it's honestly primitive and clunky. I would love to find a new, modern, and power user friendly open-source email client.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday June 10 2021, @08:29AM (9 children)
I'm writing this in Vivaldi on Win 7. Old Opera (12.18) is my main browser, but have to use Vivaldi for many sites that require TLS 1.3 - Old Opera will only do TLS 1.2.
Much to say about Vivaldi. I've been loving it, other than it being a huge lumbering pig (thank you google chrome), it has great features, very well worth a try. The latest few versions suddenly did something horrific with bookmark adding and general bookmark management, so I dropped back to 3.7.2218.55. If 4.x has the same horrible ctl-D bookmark handling, I'll move on to Brave, Otter, something else...
I'm interested in the email client. I was using Old Opera, but my (stupid) ISP increased their security protocols (I guess TLS 1.3?) and Old Opera email client ceased to work. I was in a bit of a panic, as they did it to me with no warning, so I scrambled to find something useful. I forget why, but I did not like Thunderbird. I settled on Claws Mail. It's quite multi-platform, and overall seems to have all the features and functionality I need. However: the Windows port isn't being updated, and it's a CPU-saturating pig. If it can't get a fast Internet connection, it really clobbers the CPU and system in general (IO blocking I suppose). Poorly behaved. Worth a try, esp. on other platforms.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @11:28AM (5 children)
I was going to recommend Sylpheed [wikipedia.org], which forked from Claws years ago, but I checked and the most recent Windows build of Claws-Mail is more recent than any release of Sylpheed (January 2018).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday June 10 2021, @05:27PM (3 children)
I don't remember hearing of "Sylpheed", so thank you so much. I'm okay with it being older- if it works. :) Maybe I'll even get involved with it, depending if I ever get any free time back. And if it's not too badly written... Thanks again!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Friday June 11 2021, @03:28AM (2 children)
Huh. It's much like the old Netscape mail client, except updated for multiple mailboxes. -- Which is why I use SeaMonkey for email; I like that style, but need umpteen mailboxes and folders and such.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday June 12 2021, @12:48AM (1 child)
... Netscrape mail client... slowly the cobwebs are clearing... way back in the 90s I used Netscape email... but never actually used the client. I used it to get pop3 mail, then pine (alpine) to actually read and write. I forget all the details, but I had tried fetchmail and a couple of other pop3 fetchers and found them too fiddly. Netscape got me the inbox, then I copied it, or catted it, or something, over to my main inbox (all on Linux).
I'm not sure if I ever tried SeaMonkey, and I don't think I knew that SeaMonkey had an email client. Thank you for that- I'll try it.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday June 12 2021, @01:28AM
Netscape ruined me... that's how I want email to work. And Seamonkey, like Netscape, still keeps email in a plaintext file. I've seen too many disasters from databased email, so that ugly textfile is one of my requirements. And you can copy it wherever you like; it doesn't care.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by visiblink on Friday June 11 2021, @12:04AM
You have that backwards. Sylpheed was the original client. Claws is the fork.
See the bottom of this page: https://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information [claws-mail.org]
I think Claws is the best email client on Linux. The constant font-size shifting in Thunderbird is enough to drive you insane.
On Windows, the free version of eM Client is quite good. The paid version is fairly expensive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kunasou on Thursday June 10 2021, @12:30PM (2 children)
In 3.8 they've really messed up bookmarking.
When Control+D is pressed it displays that it has saved the bookmark. But... You have to click inside the notification to select the correct folder and it's quite messy.
Still... They've tried to fix it a bit in 4.0:
- The bookmark added dialog can be enforced in the settings ("Always Open Bookmarks Dialog").
- The search thing didn't work correctly in 3.8 . I have a lot of subfolders, subsubfolders with shared names, things like:
-> Toolbar -> TV -> Channels
-> Dial -> Gaming -> Channels.
I searched for "Channels" and two folders with the same name appeared... But I couldn't tell which one was the correct!
The good thing is that in 4.0, the whole tree appears in the results allowing to pick the one I want.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday June 10 2021, @05:47PM (1 child)
Yeah, thanks. I'm not sure if the whole bookmarks interface is Vivaldi's, or google chrome.
I wish someone would (or even could) explain to me how things like that happen. It can be physical / hardware, or software. Something is working perfectly, does not need any changes at all, and someone comes along and maybe just for the sake of change, they break it. I'm sure there are lots of mechanisms for this, but you'd hope there'd be beta testers, other developers, product managers, someone who would say "oh, this is incredibly stupid, no just no". Linux is so good because Linus is pretty good at enforcing sanity.
In general, besides the heavy slow bloated pig Vivaldi and other chrome derivatives have become, bookmarks handling is probably what I hate the most in Vivaldi. Old Opera: add bookmark dialog shows you tree, and actually lets you create new folders! Woa dude! Vivaldi has never given that option. And, the bookmarks editor is horrible (IMHO). And, bookmarks are stored in a huge binary blob file. Whenever you add a bookmarks, or edit bookmarks, the CPU saturates for several seconds and Vivaldi is unresponsive. The bookmarks blob pig is full of various picture files, including thumbnails, icons, etc. Incredibly stupid. Old Opera stores them in their own folder. You can delete individual ones if you like, or clean out the whole folder. How is coding going backwards?
When I get some free time (probably never) I'll try 4.x, and thank you for giving me some hope. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kunasou on Thursday June 10 2021, @09:29PM
I think is something Vivaldi redid since Chromium works the way it's used to for a few years.
After the 4.0 fixes I actually prefer the current Control+D behavior.
Having a proper working folder search backed in is a nice thing (Chromium needs an additional popup).
You can create folders on the fly with the "new folder" icon located at the top right of the folder tree view.
The bookmarks slowdown is something I never seen since I only have 1000 bookmarks (well, someone should create 1 million on a clean profile someday if it can be automated).
But UI slowdowns are the pain of Vivaldi... Maybe they should use something different instead of React or the codebase is quite bad (maybe that's why they don't open source it?).
For me this days it's just changing stuff just for the sake of change. It's like cable operators fixing one cable and breaking another (used to happen in my country)... An ugly way to keep work going stable for years.
Another example is Firefox, they broke their interface with Australis, somehow fixed it with Quantum (but they killed a great part of their addon ecosystem), messed it a bit with Photon and messed up with Proton.
They don't care about betatesters complaining, their think that their view is either great or superior and other people should adapt to it.
So, people get tired of this and where possible they just go away (ie, that cable company is losing a lot of clients, Firefox's marketshare is plummeting) or if there's a monopoly they just accept (angrily) the changes that are force fed to them (Adobe tools or Chrome at workplace).
You're welcome :)!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday June 10 2021, @10:15AM (2 children)
Many folks use WhatsApp (and even Facebook) because email is broken. A decent client (plus some work done on the backend) would go a long way to sorting that out...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday June 11 2021, @10:54AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday June 11 2021, @11:30AM
Not me. Lots of people I know use WhatsApp as a replacement for email (except one that scrapes your contact list and sends it to Zuckerberg).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @02:35PM
Any opinion for Mac? For work, I just moved to macOS from Win7 and I need to figure out what I'm going to use to connect to our Exchange server. Any idea what is the best solution for that, besides Outlook on Mac?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Kunasou on Thursday June 10 2021, @06:59AM (2 children)
I've been a Vivaldi user since it was released, first as a secondary browser and now as my main browser.
The included adblocker works quite well (and supports custom filter lists) but uBlock Origin is better (cosmetic filters). For Android is quite a life saver.
After all these years they've quite improved the browser's UI and its customization (via CSS, settings, etc). I have a custom CSS to make the UI even more compact and it doesn't break each update which is nice.
But... Even after the 3.7 release some actions like closing tabs still feel slower than they should (especially in a laptop).
I've tried the email capabilities twice (3.8 and 4.0) but they feel rather unpolished, more like an alpha instead of a beta. The mail client (compared to MailSpring) feels like it has a long road to overcome.
Things like: enable email at settings but the sidebar panel isn't enabled so you can see any folders unless you right click the sidebar and enable "Mail (Beta)"; doesn't recognize any alias inside your account (things that google or gmx do); you can't drag emails to classify them (animation exists, but does nothing); etc.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 10 2021, @04:53PM (1 child)
Wild speculation: Disposing that tab triggers a gigantical gargantuan cascading avalanche of refcount checking, more disposes, rinse, repeat.
Could that be true?
Assuming it were, possible fixations:
1. use real GC which can run concurrently on other cores
2. move that single dispose operation onto a brand new thread which simply does that gargantuan dispose and then the thread termites. This thread could possibly run on another core concurrently.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Kunasou on Thursday June 10 2021, @09:42PM
You're exactly right.
The Vivaldi UI uses web technologies (with react as its framework). That slows things quite dramatically (compared to the native C++ of Chromium/Brave).
Note, the good thing about that is that I have my own CSS file and I customized the whole chrome. It's the only browser besides Firefox that has that kind of user freedom.
In another forum someone debugged the whole browser and discovered that a lot of redrawing happens every time you close a tab.
Things like iterating all tabs, rewriting the whole html tree (which is an expensive operation), adjusting their width several times, updating classes (with their style impact) and finally deciding to remove the webview holder and the "div" of the tab.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @07:31PM
what kind of slave uses a closed source browser? oh yeah, the dumb slaves that think Windows and OSX are legitimate OS choices.