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I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera

I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago. I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high? Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior 15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and all other browsers today have bad defaults. I'm a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. I'm sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror. You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company's ownership changes? Great! But please don't be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don't make an offering well-suited for 2017.

tornadoboy55 10y ago
> However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. Almost everyone that uses macOS uses Apple Mail. Actually, I prefer that from having to (keep ) open a tab for Gmail.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  I even use Postbox
  - isaac_is_goat 10y ago
    I also use Postbox, it'll take quite a lot to get me away from it.
  - staticautomatic 10y ago
    I love Postbox as a mail client but the lack of calendar integration with meeting invitation support is a deal breaker for my work with corporate clients. I got by with the Lightning plug in for a while but it looks like they've discontinued it. I'm planning on moving back to outlook, sadly.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I wonder if there are actual statistics about this. I only know one person who uses Apple Mail.
  - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
    I don't think it's something that anyone's tried to quantify, no. I know a few people who use Apple Mail, though, including people who are pretty technically savvy. I don't (in my last job I used MailPlane, and at home I was using Postbox but recently switched to Spark), but my impression is that for many people Mail is in the "good enough" category.
  - SyneRyder 10y ago
    If you run a mailing list on Mailchimp, it provides stats on the email clients that subscribers are using, presumably detected from the User-Agent that HTML email clients send when downloading images. My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email. Email Client Marketshare also shows Apple Mail with 7% marketshare as of 1 January 2017: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ https://emailclientmarketshare.com/
    - grzm 10y ago
      My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email. Does this breakdown take into account the OS? Is that 8% of macOS subscribers running Apple Mail, or of all subscribers? I'm unfamiliar with what data you have avialable, so I'm not sure if this is even possible. Thanks for the link to emailclientmarketshare.com. As you noted, Apple Mail is at 8%. The Apple iPhone figure is pretty amazing, at 33%!
      - SyneRyder 10y ago
        Oh, I meant 8% of all subscribers use Apple Mail. It isn't 8% of macOS users, but 8% of any device. So the percentage of Mac users with Apple Mail would be higher than 8%. You could try calculating something similar with the Email Client Marketshare figures: remove all the iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows clients and calculate from what's left. If I do that I estimate 15 - 20% of macOS folks using Apple Mail, with the rest mostly using Gmail.
- Tomis02 10y ago
  In my corporation people usually use Outlook.
- mtone 10y ago
  And on windows 10, I now use the built-in Mail app, which is almost there for home/casual use (except notably that we still can't right-click on a file and Send to Mail. Really, Microsoft!?). I usually open the browser for better searching, such as email and google talk logs with a certain person, and somehow I doubt a third-party will implement that feature as well as gmail does.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Almost everyone I know using email for business uses a desktop client - usually Mac Mail, sometimes thunderbird. A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.
- webmaven 10y ago
  My circle of Friends and Family contains a few Outlook[0] diehards as well. I sympathize, as I was an Evolution loyalist for a very long time. It started crashing under the load of multi-GB folders, so I migrated to GMail. I was considering switching to Thunderbird when they dissolved Mozilla Messaging[1]. Now my G-Suite storage is running up against the free limits, so I will probably be looking at migrating email back to the desktop this year. [0] No, not Outlook Express (with it's support for NNTP), I mean the version of Outlook that is part of Office. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Messaging
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I'm using Thunderbird and I can't wait for a mail client comparable to the old Opera's to switch. It would be fantastic.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  it would be nice if Trojita was ready for everyday use.
- morganvachon 10y ago
  Another use case is someone like me. I absolutely love Fastmail's web client, it's better than any other web client I've used including Gmail. However, I also have a few email addresses for domains that I own, and I don't want to deal with clunky forwarding; I prefer to use them as-is. For those it's much, much easier to use a good desktop client rather than set up and maintain Roundcube or even SquirrelMail on my servers. Windows 10's Mail app is not quite up to the task; it's fine for Outlook.com webmail but I need something much more powerful on Windows without having to buy Outlook proper (on Linux this obviously isn't an issue, there is a wealth of good desktop email clients for X and the console). So far I've been doing well with Thunderbird, but I'm tempted to give Vivaldi a shot since I was always a fan of Opera's email integration.
suprfnk 10y ago
> the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. Really? That's dumb. Why would I want my browser to check my email? That should be another program, or just a webpage. The browser browses the internet. Perhaps I'm not the audience, as I've always liked the Unix "do one thing and do it well" approach.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > The browser browses the internet. You mean 'the World Wide Web' [1] since 'the Internet' includes other protocols than HTTP(S) such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. Nowadays, Node is everywhere. Slack, using JavaScript, is replacing IRC. One of the best e-mail clients is Nylas N1 which uses JavaScript under the hood. Hyper is a terminal using JavaScript. Discord is becoming the defacto standard for VoIP gaming, and uses JavaScript under the hood. In a way, the WWW -via JavaScript- is invading the space of the traditional protocols. You may find that bloat, but all of the above applications provide an excellent user experience. The UIs work very well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    > The UIs work very well. Maybe on your top-of-the-line computer. On my two-year-old Macbook Air, browsing the web is pure frustration, because everything is slow. Don't even get me started on how inferior Slack is compared to a local IRC client.
    - rootlocus 10y ago
      Kind of off-topic, but is a two year old Mackbook Air having problems with just browsing the web? Because if it's not a "top-of-the-line computer", it sure costs more than one.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        This thread spurred me to do some testing, and it turned out that the "HTTPS everywhere" extension was slowing down pageloads in Firefox by MULTIPLE SECONDS. https://www.tithess.gr/ https://www.tithess.gr/ loaded in 1.3 seconds in Chrome and 6.8 in Firefox. Disabling HTTPS everywhere brought them to parity, but I'm going to switch to Vivaldi, I think. I've been having problems with slowness for years with this. I dreaded having to open the browser every time. Hopefully now it will be a better, and it's looking much better so far...
Aoyagi 10y ago
>I just don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. Well, those "most of you" clearly are not the target audience. And you're not the majority either, I should add. Sounds like you just want Chrome, to be frank.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  Nope. Like I said, I use Opera: * It still has a more impressive array of power user features than Chrome or Firefoxv * It's sync service is more reliable than the other two. * It works with Chrome extensions, and has no compatibility issues with websites (unless a site is stupid enough to check with User-Agent headers, and those can be spoofed with an extension in the worst-case). * Last but not least, Opera has the best mobile browser on the planet (something that isn't even on Vivaldi's radar yet), supporting sync between your desktop and mobile instances. Basically, it's the perfect blend of power and acknowledgment of contemporary reality today. Now don't get me wrong... I'm nervous about Opera's recent sale to China, and I certainly could be swayed toward something else. But Vivaldi feels like little more than a "protest" of Opera changes since ver. 12, and I believe that the protesters are in the minority of what is already a small community to begin with. I wish them well, but would love to see them be something truly different. Go truly open source, instead of making your code publicly visible yet still proprietary. Give more customization options, so users can choose between old-Opera or modern-browser behaviors. No one seriously expects you to "take over the world", but don't just be Opera 12.1 forever out of spite.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    From what you say, it seems to me you don't use opera, but the chrome skin they decided to keep the name of the actual browser for marketing reasons. I use opera since version 8.5 and I had to pin the v12.16 package to keep using it, which I still do today because there is no alternative to the features it had. And I have no idea what you are talking about, the whole opera supporters who supported it through the years pretty much agree the blink based opera sucks really hard and are happy to have vivaldi as an attempt to get back the awesomeness opera lost when it switched to making profit first.
Tomis02 10y ago
Man, I really miss the skins in Opera 12, there were some gorgeous ones. I agree that the email client is not necessarily a priority, however > Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on. Oh wow, that's pretty bad for every other major browser. We have two use cases: 1) I want to open the link in a new tab and switch focus (presumably to read right now). 2) I want to open the link in a new tab and not switch focus (presumably to read later). In Vivaldi you can achieve (1) by "open link in new tab", and (2) by "open link in background tab". In Chrome you can achieve (2) but no way of achieving (1) without touching the keyboard. And even when using the keyboard the shortcuts are clunkier (ctrl+shit+click vs shift+click in Vivaldi), which is probably not even relevant since I regularly observe Chrome users (programmers nonetheless) using "open link in new tab" and then clicking the new tab. We should keep in mind that most browser users are not power users. Which leads me to > but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors It's the wrong default behaviors, and ~8 years ago I could have listed you a dozen epic failures of Chrome/Firefox usability. I sincerely doubt there's some elaborate reasoning for why they behaved badly, most likely it was just inertia and "works good enough". One of my pet peeves is that Chrome/Firefox don't restore your last tab session by default, which I find extremely annoying: a regular user who doesn't even know how to open the browser options will always have to reopen the previous tabs when restarting the PC. Nowadays I rarely use Chrome/Firefox so I can't make a detailed browser comparison anymore, but from what I've been seeing there's no reason to think they're anywhere near as good as Opera 12 used to be. I agree that the usability changes could be a shock for new Vivaldi users but it shouldn't be too hard to adapt to a better way of doing things.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  Indeed, you CAN get to the common behavior by clicking an item further down on the context menu... or by pressing some unholy keyboard combination. But to be frank, it's clunky and I'm simply not going to bother so long as Opera is being actively developed. If Opera did stop, or turned into Chinese malware or something, then I would probably just jump over to Firefox and use plugins for the most Opera-like experience possible. Because sync is a must-have (including desktop and mobile)... and we'll just have disagree on whether 99.8% of the browser market has made "incorrect" UX choices on how to open a link. This reaction IS what I was talking about, and does seem at odds with Vivaldi's branding and marketing. The website slogans include, "It's your web. Surf it the way you want!", " A million ways to customize everything!", etc. But suggest letting users customize Vivaldi so that common new tab behavior is the default, and ancient Opera behavior is the one requiring extra clicks... and suddenly customization is bad, and the way people want to surf the web is objectively wrong. Come ON. Figure out what the purpose of Vivaldi is, and proceed accordingly. If the purpose is to re-implement Opera 12 out of spite toward a former employer, then that's fine... but don't have the marketing revolve around customization. If the purpose really IS customization, then don't be so hostile or dismissive when users request customization options that depart from Opera 12.
bigbugbag 10y ago
> I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. Is it really ? I have not used bookmarks since del.icio.us and never need any bookmarks sync as my bookmarks are not in the browser but in my wallabag. > it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high? my grandma, my grandpa, my mum, my dad, ... well everyone but my little cousin who only use a smartphone uses an email client, mostly thunderbird. This feature is prioritized so high because it is one, if not the most requested feature through user feedback > Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. I don't know what you are talking about. Just click a few pixels below on "open link in a background tab" instead of "open link in a new tab", problem solved. > I just don't WANT Opera from 15 years ago. (...) I want other browsers to mirror Chrome. Well then Vivaldi is not for you, just use any other browser. What I like about vivaldi is that it does not try to be like chrome and instead cater to power users like me and try to fulfill needs that other browser do not because they are too busy trying to be like chrome (which I dislike and never used on my boxes).
- temp 10y ago
  >never need any bookmarks sync as my bookmarks are not in the browser but in my wallabag Most people have never even heard of "wallabag" and yes, having your bookmarks synced across browser instances on various devices is a fundamental feature. If I bookmark something on a mobile device or a laptop, I want it to be available on my desktop (and vice-versa), without having to use third party tools.
colanderman 10y ago
Right click -> open in background tab has been in Vivaldi for as long as I can remember. Sure it's the SECOND menu item but so?
- silent_hunter 10y ago
  Background tab is middle click, all browsers support it and it was in Opera for ages.
rootlocus 10y ago
> Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. I've always used the middle click to open a new tab in background. Vivaldi has the same behavior in this regard.
norswap 10y ago
Bookmark sync should be provided by an add-on (so that it can sync cross-browser as well). There's Xmarks and given that Vivaldi has some compatibility with Chrome Addons, this should work (if it doesn't, improving addon compat should be top priority).

tornadoboy55 10y ago

> However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. Almost everyone that uses macOS uses Apple Mail. Actually, I prefer that from having to (keep ) open a tab for Gmail.

tnecniv 10y ago
I even use Postbox
- isaac_is_goat 10y ago
  I also use Postbox, it'll take quite a lot to get me away from it.
- staticautomatic 10y ago
  I love Postbox as a mail client but the lack of calendar integration with meeting invitation support is a deal breaker for my work with corporate clients. I got by with the Lightning plug in for a while but it looks like they've discontinued it. I'm planning on moving back to outlook, sadly.
ajmurmann 10y ago
I wonder if there are actual statistics about this. I only know one person who uses Apple Mail.
- chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  I don't think it's something that anyone's tried to quantify, no. I know a few people who use Apple Mail, though, including people who are pretty technically savvy. I don't (in my last job I used MailPlane, and at home I was using Postbox but recently switched to Spark), but my impression is that for many people Mail is in the "good enough" category.
- SyneRyder 10y ago
  If you run a mailing list on Mailchimp, it provides stats on the email clients that subscribers are using, presumably detected from the User-Agent that HTML email clients send when downloading images. My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email. Email Client Marketshare also shows Apple Mail with 7% marketshare as of 1 January 2017: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ https://emailclientmarketshare.com/
  - grzm 10y ago
    My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email. Does this breakdown take into account the OS? Is that 8% of macOS subscribers running Apple Mail, or of all subscribers? I'm unfamiliar with what data you have avialable, so I'm not sure if this is even possible. Thanks for the link to emailclientmarketshare.com. As you noted, Apple Mail is at 8%. The Apple iPhone figure is pretty amazing, at 33%!
    - SyneRyder 10y ago
      Oh, I meant 8% of all subscribers use Apple Mail. It isn't 8% of macOS users, but 8% of any device. So the percentage of Mac users with Apple Mail would be higher than 8%. You could try calculating something similar with the Email Client Marketshare figures: remove all the iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows clients and calculate from what's left. If I do that I estimate 15 - 20% of macOS folks using Apple Mail, with the rest mostly using Gmail.
Tomis02 10y ago
In my corporation people usually use Outlook.
mtone 10y ago
And on windows 10, I now use the built-in Mail app, which is almost there for home/casual use (except notably that we still can't right-click on a file and Send to Mail. Really, Microsoft!?). I usually open the browser for better searching, such as email and google talk logs with a certain person, and somehow I doubt a third-party will implement that feature as well as gmail does.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Almost everyone I know using email for business uses a desktop client - usually Mac Mail, sometimes thunderbird. A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.

webmaven 10y ago
My circle of Friends and Family contains a few Outlook[0] diehards as well. I sympathize, as I was an Evolution loyalist for a very long time. It started crashing under the load of multi-GB folders, so I migrated to GMail. I was considering switching to Thunderbird when they dissolved Mozilla Messaging[1]. Now my G-Suite storage is running up against the free limits, so I will probably be looking at migrating email back to the desktop this year. [0] No, not Outlook Express (with it's support for NNTP), I mean the version of Outlook that is part of Office. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Messaging
StavrosK 10y ago
I'm using Thunderbird and I can't wait for a mail client comparable to the old Opera's to switch. It would be fantastic.
bigbugbag 10y ago
it would be nice if Trojita was ready for everyday use.
morganvachon 10y ago
Another use case is someone like me. I absolutely love Fastmail's web client, it's better than any other web client I've used including Gmail. However, I also have a few email addresses for domains that I own, and I don't want to deal with clunky forwarding; I prefer to use them as-is. For those it's much, much easier to use a good desktop client rather than set up and maintain Roundcube or even SquirrelMail on my servers. Windows 10's Mail app is not quite up to the task; it's fine for Outlook.com webmail but I need something much more powerful on Windows without having to buy Outlook proper (on Linux this obviously isn't an issue, there is a wealth of good desktop email clients for X and the console). So far I've been doing well with Thunderbird, but I'm tempted to give Vivaldi a shot since I was always a fan of Opera's email integration.

suprfnk 10y ago

> the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. Really? That's dumb. Why would I want my browser to check my email? That should be another program, or just a webpage. The browser browses the internet. Perhaps I'm not the audience, as I've always liked the Unix "do one thing and do it well" approach.

Fnoord 10y ago
> The browser browses the internet. You mean 'the World Wide Web' [1] since 'the Internet' includes other protocols than HTTP(S) such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. Nowadays, Node is everywhere. Slack, using JavaScript, is replacing IRC. One of the best e-mail clients is Nylas N1 which uses JavaScript under the hood. Hyper is a terminal using JavaScript. Discord is becoming the defacto standard for VoIP gaming, and uses JavaScript under the hood. In a way, the WWW -via JavaScript- is invading the space of the traditional protocols. You may find that bloat, but all of the above applications provide an excellent user experience. The UIs work very well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
- StavrosK 10y ago
  > The UIs work very well. Maybe on your top-of-the-line computer. On my two-year-old Macbook Air, browsing the web is pure frustration, because everything is slow. Don't even get me started on how inferior Slack is compared to a local IRC client.
  - rootlocus 10y ago
    Kind of off-topic, but is a two year old Mackbook Air having problems with just browsing the web? Because if it's not a "top-of-the-line computer", it sure costs more than one.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      This thread spurred me to do some testing, and it turned out that the "HTTPS everywhere" extension was slowing down pageloads in Firefox by MULTIPLE SECONDS. https://www.tithess.gr/ https://www.tithess.gr/ loaded in 1.3 seconds in Chrome and 6.8 in Firefox. Disabling HTTPS everywhere brought them to parity, but I'm going to switch to Vivaldi, I think. I've been having problems with slowness for years with this. I dreaded having to open the browser every time. Hopefully now it will be a better, and it's looking much better so far...

Aoyagi 10y ago

>I just don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. Well, those "most of you" clearly are not the target audience. And you're not the majority either, I should add. Sounds like you just want Chrome, to be frank.

StevePerkins 10y ago
Nope. Like I said, I use Opera: * It still has a more impressive array of power user features than Chrome or Firefoxv * It's sync service is more reliable than the other two. * It works with Chrome extensions, and has no compatibility issues with websites (unless a site is stupid enough to check with User-Agent headers, and those can be spoofed with an extension in the worst-case). * Last but not least, Opera has the best mobile browser on the planet (something that isn't even on Vivaldi's radar yet), supporting sync between your desktop and mobile instances. Basically, it's the perfect blend of power and acknowledgment of contemporary reality today. Now don't get me wrong... I'm nervous about Opera's recent sale to China, and I certainly could be swayed toward something else. But Vivaldi feels like little more than a "protest" of Opera changes since ver. 12, and I believe that the protesters are in the minority of what is already a small community to begin with. I wish them well, but would love to see them be something truly different. Go truly open source, instead of making your code publicly visible yet still proprietary. Give more customization options, so users can choose between old-Opera or modern-browser behaviors. No one seriously expects you to "take over the world", but don't just be Opera 12.1 forever out of spite.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  From what you say, it seems to me you don't use opera, but the chrome skin they decided to keep the name of the actual browser for marketing reasons. I use opera since version 8.5 and I had to pin the v12.16 package to keep using it, which I still do today because there is no alternative to the features it had. And I have no idea what you are talking about, the whole opera supporters who supported it through the years pretty much agree the blink based opera sucks really hard and are happy to have vivaldi as an attempt to get back the awesomeness opera lost when it switched to making profit first.

Tomis02 10y ago

Man, I really miss the skins in Opera 12, there were some gorgeous ones. I agree that the email client is not necessarily a priority, however > Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on. Oh wow, that's pretty bad for every other major browser. We have two use cases: 1) I want to open the link in a new tab and switch focus (presumably to read right now). 2) I want to open the link in a new tab and not switch focus (presumably to read later). In Vivaldi you can achieve (1) by "open link in new tab", and (2) by "open link in background tab". In Chrome you can achieve (2) but no way of achieving (1) without touching the keyboard. And even when using the keyboard the shortcuts are clunkier (ctrl+shit+click vs shift+click in Vivaldi), which is probably not even relevant since I regularly observe Chrome users (programmers nonetheless) using "open link in new tab" and then clicking the new tab. We should keep in mind that most browser users are not power users. Which leads me to > but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors It's the wrong default behaviors, and ~8 years ago I could have listed you a dozen epic failures of Chrome/Firefox usability. I sincerely doubt there's some elaborate reasoning for why they behaved badly, most likely it was just inertia and "works good enough". One of my pet peeves is that Chrome/Firefox don't restore your last tab session by default, which I find extremely annoying: a regular user who doesn't even know how to open the browser options will always have to reopen the previous tabs when restarting the PC. Nowadays I rarely use Chrome/Firefox so I can't make a detailed browser comparison anymore, but from what I've been seeing there's no reason to think they're anywhere near as good as Opera 12 used to be. I agree that the usability changes could be a shock for new Vivaldi users but it shouldn't be too hard to adapt to a better way of doing things.

StevePerkins 10y ago
Indeed, you CAN get to the common behavior by clicking an item further down on the context menu... or by pressing some unholy keyboard combination. But to be frank, it's clunky and I'm simply not going to bother so long as Opera is being actively developed. If Opera did stop, or turned into Chinese malware or something, then I would probably just jump over to Firefox and use plugins for the most Opera-like experience possible. Because sync is a must-have (including desktop and mobile)... and we'll just have disagree on whether 99.8% of the browser market has made "incorrect" UX choices on how to open a link. This reaction IS what I was talking about, and does seem at odds with Vivaldi's branding and marketing. The website slogans include, "It's your web. Surf it the way you want!", " A million ways to customize everything!", etc. But suggest letting users customize Vivaldi so that common new tab behavior is the default, and ancient Opera behavior is the one requiring extra clicks... and suddenly customization is bad, and the way people want to surf the web is objectively wrong. Come ON. Figure out what the purpose of Vivaldi is, and proceed accordingly. If the purpose is to re-implement Opera 12 out of spite toward a former employer, then that's fine... but don't have the marketing revolve around customization. If the purpose really IS customization, then don't be so hostile or dismissive when users request customization options that depart from Opera 12.

bigbugbag 10y ago

> I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. Is it really ? I have not used bookmarks since del.icio.us and never need any bookmarks sync as my bookmarks are not in the browser but in my wallabag. > it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high? my grandma, my grandpa, my mum, my dad, ... well everyone but my little cousin who only use a smartphone uses an email client, mostly thunderbird. This feature is prioritized so high because it is one, if not the most requested feature through user feedback > Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. I don't know what you are talking about. Just click a few pixels below on "open link in a background tab" instead of "open link in a new tab", problem solved. > I just don't WANT Opera from 15 years ago. (...) I want other browsers to mirror Chrome. Well then Vivaldi is not for you, just use any other browser. What I like about vivaldi is that it does not try to be like chrome and instead cater to power users like me and try to fulfill needs that other browser do not because they are too busy trying to be like chrome (which I dislike and never used on my boxes).

temp 10y ago
>never need any bookmarks sync as my bookmarks are not in the browser but in my wallabag Most people have never even heard of "wallabag" and yes, having your bookmarks synced across browser instances on various devices is a fundamental feature. If I bookmark something on a mobile device or a laptop, I want it to be available on my desktop (and vice-versa), without having to use third party tools.

colanderman 10y ago

Right click -> open in background tab has been in Vivaldi for as long as I can remember. Sure it's the SECOND menu item but so?

silent_hunter 10y ago
Background tab is middle click, all browsers support it and it was in Opera for ages.

rootlocus 10y ago

> Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. I've always used the middle click to open a new tab in background. Vivaldi has the same behavior in this regard.

norswap 10y ago

Bookmark sync should be provided by an add-on (so that it can sync cross-browser as well). There's Xmarks and given that Vivaldi has some compatibility with Chrome Addons, this should work (if it doesn't, improving addon compat should be top priority).