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It feels like they're trying to serve two competing goals with this: 1) Be a faster, lighter, more customizable competitor to Chrome 2) Be a full "Internet su

It feels like they're trying to serve two competing goals with this: 1) Be a faster, lighter, more customizable competitor to Chrome 2) Be a full "Internet suite" with browser and email client I'm sure how well you can accomplish #1 while pouring resources into #2. Moreover, I'm not sure how much of an audience there even is for #2. The minority who want a desktop email client are very vocal about it, but most of us haven't used an email fat client in years (save for perhaps Outlook when forced to at work). I was a huge fan of Opera back in the day, and still use it as the primary browser on my phone. But even in its heyday, Opera's mail client was pretty weak compared to Thunderbird or other options. Bolting-on a "meh" email client to a web browser is like a digital wristwatch that prominently display the current YEAR on the main screen... a largely unnecessary feature that just takes up room. I toyed around with an earlier release of Vivaldi, and thought it looked promising. But at this point I wouldn't even consider a browser that doesn't sync bookmarks and other data across my devices. In terms of prioritizing resources, I care about that 1,000x more than re-implementing Opera features from the late 90's that most people won't use.

ahoka 10y ago
They are kinda repeating the mistakes of Opera. I used Vivaldi for a few weeks and I really wanted to like it but it has (at least currently) to many quirks. For example not being able to delete addresses from the history which is given for every other browser. All I want is a Chrome with a nicer GUI.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Your example doesn't make a lot of sense. Opera can delete adresses from history. In fact, there are many things Opera does that other browsers can't.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    But we are talking about Vivaldi!
  - ahoka 10y ago
    I mean that they are focusing on the wrong things while having a really great potential.
Mithaldu 10y ago
Doing 1) AND 2) is perfectly possible. If you're writing it in a performant language. Opera has proven that by still being faster (qualifier: on windows and when excluding JS-heavy tasks) than either Chrome or Firefox. Just a simple thing as switching between tabs is immediately noticably faster in Opera than either of those, even when you have 100 diverse tabs open. Vivaldi's problem is that they're building on top of chromium in all JS, which puts certain limits on just how efficient they can be performance-wise. Additionally they're constrained in what they can implement by being tied to chromium, anything they can't do with chromium as it is, they'll have to implement changes in chromium and either live on a fork or try and push them upstream, both of which have high organizational costs. Also, as a sidenote for the Opera email client: I'm curious how you think it was weaker than Thunderbird? I've been using it for over a decade and technically i find it far superior, just with its ability to set up mutually inclusive folders that automatically sort email into themselves based on the same bayesian patterns that work for spam, and can be taught simply by dragging things in/out. Additionally, the comment about it "taking up room" is senseless, since it only uses any CPU/RAM if you actively enable it, and Opera's installer has always been tiny.
naasking 10y ago
> faster, lighter, more customizable Pick any two.
- oblio 10y ago
  For a lot of years Opera had all 3. It was faster and used less resources than Firefox while it was more customizable out of the box (Firefox needed heavy duty plugins for parity or better). The full Opera installer was something like 5MB for a full browser + email/RSS client + IRC client + torrent client.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Firefox's interface can be customized with CSS, without the need for a browser extension, so I'm not sure, how you could be more customizable than that...
feld 10y ago
Opera's mail client was awesome. It was much faster than Thunderbird or Outlook. Those would blow up with my inboxes of 500,000+ emails but Opera just chugged right along and worked without any problems. It also synced IMAP from scratch way faster, too. edit: The search was incredible as well
- oblio 10y ago
  I really miss their old mail client. I guess they didn't target the enterprise email cloud and as a result couldn't fund it. It probably needed calendaring for that...
folksonomy 10y ago
Vivaldi seems very useful for a virtual machine environment. For example, a Windows machine with just Vivadli installed and nothing else would be a nice all-in-one surfing solution. (No need for a separate email client). I typically do this now. Just dedicate a whole VM to a browser. One box with Firefox, one with M$ Edge, one with Brave, etc. The more browsers there are the better. Competition reasons aside (it's difficult to actually compete with Edge, Chrome, and FF). But the more browsers I have to play with, the more I can play with them, and I never get bored. They're fun and novel! Brave being an example of a browser I will never take seriously: https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/

ahoka 10y ago

They are kinda repeating the mistakes of Opera. I used Vivaldi for a few weeks and I really wanted to like it but it has (at least currently) to many quirks. For example not being able to delete addresses from the history which is given for every other browser. All I want is a Chrome with a nicer GUI.

Mithaldu 10y ago
Your example doesn't make a lot of sense. Opera can delete adresses from history. In fact, there are many things Opera does that other browsers can't.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  But we are talking about Vivaldi!
- ahoka 10y ago
  I mean that they are focusing on the wrong things while having a really great potential.

Mithaldu 10y ago

Doing 1) AND 2) is perfectly possible. If you're writing it in a performant language. Opera has proven that by still being faster (qualifier: on windows and when excluding JS-heavy tasks) than either Chrome or Firefox. Just a simple thing as switching between tabs is immediately noticably faster in Opera than either of those, even when you have 100 diverse tabs open. Vivaldi's problem is that they're building on top of chromium in all JS, which puts certain limits on just how efficient they can be performance-wise. Additionally they're constrained in what they can implement by being tied to chromium, anything they can't do with chromium as it is, they'll have to implement changes in chromium and either live on a fork or try and push them upstream, both of which have high organizational costs. Also, as a sidenote for the Opera email client: I'm curious how you think it was weaker than Thunderbird? I've been using it for over a decade and technically i find it far superior, just with its ability to set up mutually inclusive folders that automatically sort email into themselves based on the same bayesian patterns that work for spam, and can be taught simply by dragging things in/out. Additionally, the comment about it "taking up room" is senseless, since it only uses any CPU/RAM if you actively enable it, and Opera's installer has always been tiny.

naasking 10y ago

> faster, lighter, more customizable Pick any two.

oblio 10y ago
For a lot of years Opera had all 3. It was faster and used less resources than Firefox while it was more customizable out of the box (Firefox needed heavy duty plugins for parity or better). The full Opera installer was something like 5MB for a full browser + email/RSS client + IRC client + torrent client.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Firefox's interface can be customized with CSS, without the need for a browser extension, so I'm not sure, how you could be more customizable than that...

feld 10y ago

Opera's mail client was awesome. It was much faster than Thunderbird or Outlook. Those would blow up with my inboxes of 500,000+ emails but Opera just chugged right along and worked without any problems. It also synced IMAP from scratch way faster, too. edit: The search was incredible as well

oblio 10y ago
I really miss their old mail client. I guess they didn't target the enterprise email cloud and as a result couldn't fund it. It probably needed calendaring for that...

folksonomy 10y ago

Vivaldi seems very useful for a virtual machine environment. For example, a Windows machine with just Vivadli installed and nothing else would be a nice all-in-one surfing solution. (No need for a separate email client). I typically do this now. Just dedicate a whole VM to a browser. One box with Firefox, one with M$ Edge, one with Brave, etc. The more browsers there are the better. Competition reasons aside (it's difficult to actually compete with Edge, Chrome, and FF). But the more browsers I have to play with, the more I can play with them, and I never get bored. They're fun and novel! Brave being an example of a browser I will never take seriously: https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/