Vivaldi Mail 1.0: Email client built into the browser | Hacker News Reader

Vivaldi Mail 1.0: Email client built into the browser

vivaldi.com

153 pointsthm160 comments

I don’t know why, but all local email clients lately suck. Mutt sucks more, not less. They all get confused about your mailboxes having tens of thousands of messages, an unavoidable side effect of your email provider giving you many gigabytes of email space. They all fuck up your threads. They all freeze while pulling another thousand of headers for that high-traffic mailing list. They all suck mightily at search. They all have a broken UI paradigm and show you the least important thing first.

Believe you me, I tried them all.

Actually, the only email client that sucked the least of them all was Microsoft Outlook. I’d never believe I’d admit it while sober, but here I am.

Now it looks like your email provider’s webmail is not that bad, unless it’s some sort of imap client on server (RoundCube, for example). It efficiently delivers a view into your whole mailbox without downloading the whole thing. Search works better. You define your email rules and they work at the source.

Dunno, man, the world sucks in general, and the world of email in particular.

Have a look at notmuch

Agreed. All I want is the ability to grep my mail.

I've done that when searching in-app has failed me, grepping through the mail store on a zimbra instance. Only useful for plain mail though, unless you are scanning headers not bodies. One day I might write a script to harvest IMAP accounts into a database (unpacking encodings on the way into the DB, and sitting a few other transforms & derivations where relevant like finding the local "received for" information and putting it in an efficiently searchable column, so things are easily located) so I can just SQL the crap out of it. Doing the same to a filesystem structure designed for easy getting might work if you'd prefer that.

Try `magrep` from `mblaze`. All you need is a maildir.

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

I don't remember things being so bad back when IMAP was more popular. That and back when threaded messages were a thing. Nowadays, the way gmail shows threads is about the best I can expect.

What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.

Can you explain the difference between threaded messages and what gmail does?

Gmail displays you a "conversation" where there's only one parent messages and threading is lost inside. It's bearable when conversation is more or less under control. But inside it, you lose, UI-wise, the information on who actually replied to whom. The only way you can infer that is if all participants have good quoting discipline.

> What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.

If you have a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages and you also use mutt's IMAP capabilities, mutt's UI is going to freeze on you for prolonged periods of time. It also is trying very hard to be efficient and only download relevant stuff, but somehow it translates to "is downloading stuff all the time" (and freezes its UI while doing so).

Basically you reproduce this by subscribing to a high-traffic mailing list, letting it send you stuff for a month, then trying to use Mutt on that.

It also turns out that a maildir with all that stuff is also a stress test for your filesystem, so you add all deficiencies of email client to all deficiencies of your filesystem. Meh.

Crap... Late to getting back to this.

Newsgroups used to churn through a ton of messages. I don't remember them bogging down this badly. ;(

Maybe it boils down to async being hard and Mutt actually using synchronous network transfers, obliviously assuming they would be zero-cost which they are obviously not.

There's also this work in configuration that you have to do to shoehorn Gmail's labels into Mutt's mailboxes. Oh, have I mentioned already that your 100K+ messages in one maildir will be really, really taxing on your filesystem?

I don't know, maybe someone should come and try and reinvent this whole crap around more modern workflows.

I'm tempted to get gnus running again. :) Love to see how things compare to my memory.

> the world sucks in general

It does! But like the other HN post about software complexity, it has a lot to do with our ever-increasing expectations and demands.

When email was just plain text, it was way easier to deal with. Now it's rare to receive an email which does not have and image or more in addition to the text (which itself may be plain and html (a non-standard, host+client specific subset of).

I gave up on using email clients. I now just use web clients. Consequently I have 4 email websites I regularly use. But at least when crap fails, it's not a problem on my end, and there's no point in spending time to troubleshoot. Honestly, stuff rarely fails. Gmail website works for me usually. Zoho works always (or at least I've never caught it with a problem). Tutanota works mostly, sometimes awkwardly. Protonmail works as long as you understand it.

My complaint is cloud storage. They all fall down, except for Tresorit; but it's rather expensive.

The Bat!

> Believe you me, I tried them all.

I'm curious, what issues did you encounter with Thunderbird?

I have found Thunderbird pretty wonderful overall. Using my Gmail as an example, I can select the "All Mail" folder (about 50,000 messages) and press Ctrl+Shift+K (for search) and it shows me results in just a few seconds.

I use Thunderbird to manage multiple email accounts, and it has been a huge time saver having it all unified in one place.

I like Thunderbird but sometimes it just gets ... stuck. I don't know of any better way to explain it.

I presume that some networking thing hits its limits and needs to time out (generally DNS ... it's always DNS). After some mysterious amount of time, Thunderbird gets unstuck and continues on its merry way.

The real problem, at the end of the day, is single-threaded GUI toolkits, though.

I used to have some hangs as well, but then I played around with the compaction settings and that seemed to fix it. I think there is a settings option to add a prompt before compaction, and maybe modify the schedule. It would be a good feature if they would allow compaction to run in the middle of the night to avoid bothering the user.

I dropped Thunderbird when my inbox reached a certain size. I can't remember exactly how many messages (probably 100k+), but not so many that I'd expect the whole thing to just grind to a halt.

For me, Thunderbird's number one defect is that it is unable to show threads unless you view all your accounts under one combined inbox. And it's not only a major defect but an absurd one as well.

Thunderbird 91 has threaded views in individual accounts. It is a little hard to enable the view though: In the header bar directly above the list of messages, there is a little "thread step" icon on the left by default, that must be clicked to enable thread view. This is next to the star icon, the paperclip, Subject, etc. Unlike the other header items, clicking the "thread" icon does not sort by threads, instead it toggles the thread view on and off.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, it is not the same. Under combined inbox (unified folders) threaded view shows your own messages while the supposedly same threaded view will omit them when viewed in any single inbox.

Thunderbird provides an option per account - Synchronisation & Storage > Message Synchronising > Keep messages in all folders. I keep it unchecked for all IMAP accounts.

Only headers are fetched in the beginning, and rest is fetched when you open and attempt to view the e-mail. Sort of a middle-ground, and saves disk space.

Thunderbird suffers from the same on-by-default phone-home/sync cancer as Firefox, the last time I looked (admittedly over a year ago).

Just curious, what kind of supercomputer do you have?

I am in an older Thinkpad on Fedora Gnome and I get the kill or keep waiting message when going through my inbox. Even k9 mail on my Poco X3 pro doesn't freeze as much.

I've been loving `mblaze`[1] lately after trying `aerc` for a few months. It's been a lot of fun using an email "client" that really emphasizes the unix philosophy. I don't have a ton of email in my primary address and I always reach inbox zero by the end of the evening. So ymmv.

[1] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

Interesting! I'm curious to how it compares to MH? Have you tried both?

What was the problem with KMail? I've found it consistently good but largely ignored by Americans (like most KDE programs, to be honest).

+1 for Kmail. One detail I found is that it's underlying engine, Akonadi, is unstable/prone to unsolvable problems (I tried!). Debian stable's version is however, of course, rock steady.

Did you try Mailspring? Positively surprised me. But Kmail still is my preferred mua.

Mailspring is great, simple, elegant and in my limited use, very functional.

I used Mailspring with about 7 accounts (fastmail, outlook, gmail and yahoo) and it routinely fails to sync and I have to reconnect them. There is also this bug I've had for well over a year on windows where if you close the window it cannot catch focus and be maximized again, found a weird trick on the forums where you double click the taskbar icon to get it back. The latter was fine but getting kicked out and missing emails made me find an alt and so far so good with Thunderbird.

Is it possible that the perf issues were related to the number of account/mail?

Unlikely, I don't think I have 10k emails between all 7 and on average I get maybe a dozen or so a day. Even when I had like 3 accounts they would randomly just disconnect and need reauth.

I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it? But putting that aside here were a few problems with Vivaldi and their Mail client the last time I tried it.

1. Vivaldi is slow. It's so slow that you could open 2 tabs on Brave/Chrome before it opens.

2. Side loading speed, memory and CPU usage is a lot more compared to other chromium based browsers. Don't know why.

3. And UI. There are so many options in settings. So many options and yet very few of them are something I'd want to change or adjust. I can't skin Vivaldi like Firefox. There are a few toggles and sliders but their overall effect to the UI is minimal.

4. Not to mention that the UI is in no way fancy or unique. But that's just personal preference. I like Chrome's simplicity. It gets out of the way. Vivaldi makes sure you notice the chrome.

5. And then the mailing client. I was really excited to try it out so I logged in via Gmail. As email accounts are these days, it contained thousands of emails. The surprising thing was Vivaldi started syncing all of them. Literally downloading thousands of emails. For no reason other than offline search? Is that really a good enough reason to make the user wait centuries while you index all their emails? Maybe they have added some option to specify which folders you want synced.

6. Aside from that, it was really buggy. Opening emails, composing, etc. Now that it's out of beta I hope those are fixed.

I went to Vivaldi for the UI. I had heard it was customizable. I left Vivaldi while it was still loading...

>1. Vivaldi is slow.

Vivaldi is not slow. I use Chrome, Firefox and Vivaldi every single day and haven't notice a single hesitation or lag when launching it. Do you have a very slow PC?

One could argue that if an app in a class of apps is slow on given hardware while others are not, it's slow, particularly for something as basic and essential as a web browser.

One could, but that's not the argument that was being made. I too use Firefox, Chrome, and Vivaldi on a daily basis and one of those three feels slower than the other two due to when UI aspects update, and it's not Vivaldi.

Last version I tried (5.4 or something), it took >10 seconds to open. I didn't have too many extensions either. My PC is far from slow since Chrome/Brave open in <2 seconds.

The startup time is indeed pretty slow, but otherwise it's fast, which is what matters for me. I restart Vivaldi usually after it got updated, or I reboot my PC, so it doesn't bother me a lot honestly.

I have noticed Vivaldi consumes vastly more memory and CPU resources.

I used a crusty decade-old Dell machine, and even that the Firefox runs way faster than Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is slow compared to Edge.

I forced myself to use it for a week. All the bells and whistles doesn't justify the slow startup time.

Opening a window in Vivaldi takes like 4 seconds. It is soo slow I want evidence of anyone who claims otherwise

You went to Vivaldi for the customizable UI, but list that as one of its defects. There are “so many options”.

That’s the point, and the reason I use it, despite its relative heaviness and slowness.

Disclaimer: It's been a while since I looked into this stuff so there are probably some inaccuracies below.

Have you ever used Opera back in the day? (mid 2000s, before Chrome came out.) AFAIK Vivaldi is made by the same guy who made Opera, being its spiritual successor. (Opera also had builtin email, note-taking etc.) IIRC opera itself was sold to a Chinese company and is now basically a Chrome reskin? (It used to have its own rendering engine, which was faster in some benchmarks.)

As for why Vivaldi is slow, the UI is done in JS (also possibly nodejs?) rather than C++ in the interest of development speed, but at the cost of performance and memory usage.

I did quit using it due the lag on my older machine though. Now that I've upgraded my hardware I might give it another spin!

I'm a tab-hoarder and Vivaldi with 4-5 windows and 100 tabs is fast on a Zen 2 Ryzen CPU, except when using the F2 shortcut key (it's a Spotlight-like quick menu), after entering a tab title I'm searching for, I have to be very patient as it freezes for several seconds while iterating through all the tabs. If I click on any other UI element or any other Vivaldi window , it crashes...

I used opera as main browser from Opera 5 to Opera 10. Use to have Opera mini on my J2ME phone as well. With every new version, the stack of bugs from previous versions was piling up and features were being reduced or getting lost to bugs. There were bugs in mouse gestures which was my main way to navigate Opera. Stopped using it when Chrome came.

If you remember, at some point Opera even use to ship custom build for you. With name or custom title or something, don't remember the exact customization.

My most used utility in Opera use to be notes and irc client which I used to ask questions basically. Never used mail though. Vivaldi promise features at the cost of performance. I have tried to use it 2 or 3 times. It feels sluggish, every click feels late. Can't use all the packed in features like that. Opera was always fast, Vivaldi is just not.

The same benefit of any other mail client: you don't have to open a tab that connects to the internet to download and sync just enough data to show "that" there are updates, but not "what" those updates are until you click through to something that then needs to pull data to show those changes.

The real question is "why is this better than a standalone mail client" like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or even the hot mess that is Outlook. To which the answer is "depending on how you do mail, it might not be better at all. But if you use Vivaldi already, or if you miss the days of Netscape Communicator 4.7, or you wish you had a mail client that got updated based on user feedback more than once every few years, then this might be something worth looking at for you.

> why is this better than a standalone mail client

In my case its because I always forget to open it or I close it by mistake.

I'm always in my browser, github, documentation, jira. so having it in my browser means I have one less thing to remember.

> I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it?

What mail client are you comparing this to? At least compared to most webmail clients I've used, these points from press release are obvious enhancements:

* Combine all your email accounts and manage them easily from a single client

* Indexed offline mail access

* Built-in feed reader

* Optionally offline calendar

I can't speak to the performance issues you've had since I haven't used Vivaldi. I find offline access and backups of e-mails important, personally.

Fastmail web client is really nice IMO : clean and fast.

> I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it?

One big benefit is the dedicated Side Panel. Keep the folder view visible on the left while you browser.

Another benefit, which may or may not matter to you in particular, is that the client can handle multiple email accounts without mixing them. This generally isn't possible in a webpage unless there's a single service that has access to all mail accounts, which isn't desirable for privacy & security reasons. But this is admittedly a niche feature.

> Another benefit, which may or may not matter to you in particular, is that the client can handle multiple email accounts without mixing them. This generally isn't possible in a webpage unless there's a single service that has access to all mail accounts, which isn't desirable for privacy & security reasons. But this is admittedly a niche feature.

Also nice is that you can tile the original email and the response side by side for sake of context, rather than having to scroll excessively.

> 5. And then the mailing client. I was really excited to try it out so I logged in via Gmail. As email accounts are these days, it contained thousands of emails. The surprising thing was Vivaldi started syncing all of them. Literally downloading thousands of emails. For no reason other than offline search? Is that really a good enough reason to make the user wait centuries while you index all their emails? Maybe they have added some option to specify which folders you want synced.

You can un/subscribe to IMAP folders in Vivaldi. The mail options tab also has a toggle for downloading messages for offline searching and uploading sent messages to the appropriate folder.

I'm personally not a huge fan of IMAP, though I've largely avoided the convergence of phone and computer; I still prefer to have my email offline on a single device, though I think these days that's a minority position. I've found that offline clients do a better job of searching email and contact management, and I have ready access to the raw text of the email in case I want or need to find something custom. It also enables me to make on-site backups.

> I went to Vivaldi for the UI. I had heard it was customizable. I left Vivaldi while it was still loading...

Yeah, with a sufficiently large inbox--or maybe expansive browsing habits?--I would guess Vivaldi probably is a bit slower than some of the alternatives. But my usage patterns accommodate this pretty easily by rarely opening and closing the browser (after all, it's my email client). My browsing experience is usually very fast because I disable Javascript and cookies by default, so I haven't really noticed any differences compared to more common browsers.

  >I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it? But putting that aside here were a few problems with Vivaldi and their Mail client the last time I tried it...

It's not. it's much much worse. I've just spent about an hour of my life i'll never get back, trying to setup some of my throwaway email accounts in Vivaldi to save opening WebMail when I want to check them. A couple of the accounts threw up server errors requiring me to visit a URL to authorise the client [ie. Vivaldi] to access the accounts via IMAP.

Vivaldi showed the server message but made it so that the message text [including the URL I was supposed to visit, which ended with a long alphanumeric string] was not selectable.

Nor could I 'view source' to copy/paste it that way

Nor could I print the page to PDF to try and retrieve it from there.

Nor could I save the data I'd entered for that account, so I could come back to it later.

So I was left with the choice of painfully transcribing about 100 char alphanumeric string by hand [for 2 separate accounts!] to go to the required authorisation URL, or throw Vivaldi in the bin. Guess which option I chose?

Incidentally. There's a special place in hell reserved for developers who make text on error messages and alerts non-selectable!

I used to use Vivaldi on both mobile and desktop. The mobile version crashed a lot, and the desktop version is super slow (especially the settings search, that thing takes like 10 seconds for you to see what you have typed). Switching from Vivaldi → LibreWolf and Vivaldi Mobile → Firefox is the best decision I have ever done in my life.

I used Vivaldi instead of figuring out alternate browser profiles, until in April it crashed constantly for just about everybody on Mac and they couldn't figure it out for 3 weeks:

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/74557/browser-keeps-closing-...

Despite not being open source, I appreciate that Vivaldi lets you customize its UI and behavior to a reasonable degree. It's the closest thing we have a browser for power users, unlike Chrome and Firefox who actively remove useful options and features in an effort to cater to the lowest common denominator (passive content consumers).

The built-in mail and calendar functionality looks very nice and I'm definitely interested in trying them out.

The main thing I disliked about Vivaldi when I tried it last was that a lot of websites actively try to prevent automatic saving and filling of passwords, against all reasonable logic. Firefox is much better at skirting those efforts, Chrome-based browsers, not so much. Has Vivaldi improved in this regard lately? (Or is there an extension that can help with this?)

In regards UI customisation is there anything like Pentadactyl?

Regarding the open source part, Jon has spoken about it on a podcast from last year[0][1]. Basically the only think keeping them from full open-source is the license which they think would make the company possibly fall to another competitor. It's hard being a small business, this makes sense to me. They actively encourage modding of the browser too.

I'm not sure regarding the prevention of automatic saving/filling. I use Bitwarden and in my time using Vivaldi, I haven't had any issues, though maybe someone in the Vivaldi forums[2] would know?

[0]: YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ivDiL9XeDw0?t=3410 [1]: Podcast website: https://destinationlinux.org/episode-243/ [2]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/

Why not use AGPL for the UI code?

That doesn't stop someone from using your code to build a compelling competitor product. It just means you need to pay more lawyers to argue about whether the AGPL was violated or not and maybe win a lawsuit.

GitLab took libgit vom GitHub, didn't they?

But the added value of the company is perfect execution of the idea, not juste the idea. The code being open source only means other people can try to be better, but it shouldn't be the number one issue.

>Vivaldi lets you customize its UI

But still nowhere close to userChrome.css that Firefos has.

>The built-in mail and calendar functionality looks very nice

But does having that functionality built-in rather as extensions offer any advantages?

> But still nowhere close to userChrome.css that Firefos has.

Dunno where are you getting that from, Vivaldi has official support for CSS Mods and unofficial support for JS Mods

I would say use bitwarden rather than the built in password managers of these browsers, it does a pretty good job and you aren't tied to one browser.

A security researcher made a strong case against this advice. Injection of privileged components into the browser sandbox as well as opening you up to a lot of IPC vulnerabilities.

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html

Is that relevant to Bitwarden? At least the first vulnerability in the article does not appear to apply to Bitwarden for me here, I'm not currently able to test the other two.

if you use the browser extension and turn autofill on it applies to Bitwarden as well. If you use the desktop version or an alternative like Keepass, which Tavis suggests, it's not an issue.

Ahh that's it, I'm not using autofill.

Ditto! Set up keyboard shortcuts (or in some use case cases), I let Bitwarden fill up credentials automatically. Miles ahead of 1Password (and their toxic optimism)

I never had this problem. Using vivaldi full time, it remembers all the passwords (plus my home address and phone number for registering new accounts on shopping sites).

Of course they cater to those awful “passive content consumers”; they need their online bank much more than you need your tiling tabs.

Vivaldi is my main graphical browser. I don’t use the mail client, but I use the feed reader, which shares the interface. It’s convenient, but clunky. You can read news from only one window, so if, like, me, you use windows instead of tabs, you have to search through all of Vivaldi’s open windows to see which one gives you access to the news feed. The update didn’t seem to change anything. I like being able to click on a button to be able to add a site’s feed to Vivaldi’s list, however.

The great thing about Vivaldi's feed reader is that you can subscribe to YouTube channels without an account (and without any ads as well).

https://vivaldi.com/blog/when-it-comes-to-youtube-and-feed-r...

I do this (albeit with Thunderbird) and honestly it works pretty great.

Nothing special: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ gives you the link to subscribe to all the site's feeds from any app/website.

You can also set custom URLs in the add-on preferences to integrate with any online feed reader (e.g https://reader.miniflux.app/bookmarklet?uri=%S). I follow Youtube channels this way.

> use windows instead of tabs

I've used Vivaldi as my primary browser for a few months now, doesn't speed cause you any issues when using new windows? I really enjoy many of the Vivaldi features but opening a new window is VERY slow for me (on my good PC and laptop, windows and linux so OS isn't the issue).

Yes, absolutely. I mentioned this in another comment here: I get at least a 2-second lag when opening a new window. This is annoying because I prefer to use windows instead of tabs and manage them with my tiling window manager. I’m handling it by, instead of closing a window when I’m done with it, leaving it open to receive a new URL.

Everyone be critiquing its software license, speed, Gui, but holy crap tab tiling is the best feature, it increases productivity by a little bit.

How many times to you get confused which browser window is in focus on your desktop

> tab tiling is the best feature [...] How many times to you get confused which browser window is in focus on your desktop

If I'm just using my browser on a window then tab tiling is a great feature, I've used it quite a bit in Vivaldi, but the second I start using windows other than my browser it gets confusing because I have to remember two sets of bindings.

Ctrl for tabs Win key for Windows

Now just add an IRC client, and they've reinvented the Mozilla suite.

Vivaldi's predecessor, Opera, actually included an IRC client that I used back in the day. I maintained an interest in Vivaldi because Opera Mail was easily the best client I've ever used, and while Vivaldi Mail lacks a few of the features that I appreciated about Opera (e.g., select-to-quote, default top-quoting/bottom-response, obvious text-based emails), it's still far and away the best current desktop application.

Opera used to have a torrent client.

And an HTTP server.

Not complete without Gopher.

Needs Gemini.

History is a closed loop. Maybe they can build their own browser engine!

"Maybe they can build their own browser again", but the web is not the cute little thing it was back when everyone was writing their own engines. Even a small team literally cannot write a web engine with enough support for the majority of common use cases anymore. It's literally why Vivaldi went with an off the shelf engine and focused on the browser part instead.

Except that Mozilla wrote their own engine.

I miss Presto :(

Very fast on super slow embedded devices.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Mozilla also had a WYSIWYG webpage editor for some reason.

Chatzilla was genuinely awful though.

I continue to question why email clients with calendar, contacts, and tasks functionality don't have local sync integrated with Android or iPhone. Having said that, outside those "basic" integrated functions, my top 3 requirements to switch from Outlook are:

- Full encryption integrated into the client for all data (e.g., I don't want Windows Search able to index the mail so someone has access when the client is closed/unencrypted; I also remember testing Thunderbird years ago and was able to go into the individual unencrypted .eml files [I think that's what they were] and read the messages without having Thunderbird opened)

- Full local sync with Android/iPhone (i.e., home WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB cable); it still amazes me that Thunderbird still doesn't have this built-in

- Xobni-like functionality (e.g., showing all emails and attachments to/from sender when clicking on an email, keyword searches); yes, I know the plugin is still available but it doesn't work properly with current Outlook versions

Well, I'm trying out Vivaldi on Android. I've been using Firefox for, well, forever, but the tab handling[1] is bad enough that I'm willing to jump ship.

So far it's... different? The tab handling is better, and I think I like having actual tabs in a mobile browser. I'm disappointed that the tab groups don't work as well as in Chrome. I like the link preview feature, in fact I could imagine all links opening like that by default (but that's not an option).

I don't find it all that customizable, that only seems to be true for the desktop version. For example, I can't get seem to rid of the history button (which is styled like a sidebar button despite opening full screen).

There is no reader mode. There are page actions, which let you apply all kinds of nonsensical CSS effects such as blur. But no reader mode. The built-in content blocker doesn't remove cosmetic annoyances as effectively as Ublock does, which makes me miss reader mode all the more.

There don't seem to be any add-ons.

Overall, not entirely convincing.

1. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20012#issueco...

> There is no reader mode.

There is, but as far as I know it's not something you can manually toggle. On sites which Vivaldi deems can be shown in reader mode, you're prompted to switch to it. I don't know what criteria it uses to determine that.

It has to be enabled: Settings→Accessibility→Simplified view for web pages

Thanks, that's pretty much equivalent to reader mode then. Though for some reason you cannot switch to other tabs while viewing one page on simplified mode? Weird.

Just set up my email and calendar with Vivaldi. I'm probably going to switch from Brave, the features work really well. I miss Opera so much this feels like home. I'm back in 2004. :)

Is there a reason why you are not happy with current Opera browser?

this was a sincere legitimate question from me, I don't understand why it got downvoted

RIP Opera mail, where you could sort mail using Bayesian filters and everything was grouped by date.

Opera Mail was awesome. I've used it while I was involved in W3C, and I could easily manage the barrage of bikeshed in multiple mailing lists thanks to its deep tree view of threads with fine-grained mute for any subtree.

Nowadays all clients flatten email threads to a single list, and that becomes unmanageable beyond a handful of e-mails ;(

> Opera Mail was awesome.

Among other killer features, the automatic sorting into mailing lists was huge for me: no more filtering, no more clutter. Opera mail was really a great client.

The killer feature that would make me use this would be EWS/OWA support. I have used davmail and evolution to access my work email this way and very few clients seem to be able to do this. Emclient is probably the best but stopped working presumably due to changes on our end so no great windows solution currently for me.

what did they say about a software that eventually starts to check email?

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Jamie Zawinski's comment is a time tested classic which has survived well e.g. Moore's law or the likes.

For a minute, I thought this was a web app that did POP/IMAP/SMTP in the browser without a server backend, but I suppose that wouldn't be possible without browser extensions.

Who funds them, and why? What's the profit plan?

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

This is a real strength of Vivaldi’s, in my opinion!

Thank you. This seems quite reasonable.

I see people give Chromium crap, but then you have a browser that is closed source now with access to your email and everyone is okay with that?

Not everyone, no, but I'd wager 97% are.

Different demographics will critique different aspects of different software. There will be an overlap between them, but it will be relatively small versus the people outside of the overlapping demographics who have used both.

E.g. I have tried Vivaldi, but it not being open source means I don't have a horse in the race. I also don't like Chromium-based browsers. Which really just leaves Firefox, which I also don't like, because Mozilla the ever-increasingly out-of-touch company.

FWIW: I hypocritically use Gmail because the UX is pretty much better than the sorry state of native email clients available on Linux. With that said, I also don't use email for anything sensitive, that goes via Matrix. Would I give access to my Gmail to Vivaldi? No.

Not sure how "closed source" is something to have a problem with in this context? Outlook is closed source, Apple Mail is closed source, and with rounding we all still use those too?

You can customise it with keyboard shortcuts, and a small time investment can give you efficiency gains, manifold!

For the life of me, I am unable to add an account to Vivaldi Mail. I am not 100% sure, but I am guessing that the error is "ReferenceError document is not defined".

Edit: after restarting, the message is "Mail client startup failed. Error: Not yet support for changing primary key".

Tried months, maybe a year ago. Could not handle my 15 year old corporate email accont with 300k emails.

Vivaldi is my android browser, because Firefox has several bugs and anti patterns there.

If I were reinstalling my desktop from scratch I would consider Vivaldi desktop as well.

I'd use Vivaldi again when kinetic scrolling finally works in Wayland. AFAIK, the Chromium feature request regarding this is already 3 years old.

> A powerful email client built right into your browser.

But I don't see a link to demo this on the web? There are only CTAs to download?

You seem to be misunderstanding. "Built right into the browser" means that it is a feature of Vivalid, which is a browser, like Chrome. This is the opposite of a page. It's not through the browser, it's built into the browser.

Last time I tried to use vivaldi for day to day browsing, I gave up because it was too slow. Have they fixed this?

Anecdata: I've been using it for a couple of years and not had any concerns with speed. I don't know what faster would be. I occasionally have to use firefox or something else on corporate machines and Vivaldi doesn't seem any slower than that on any sites I visit.

I do use Pihole to get rid of ads so maybe that's a factor

I use Vivaldi and there are no speed issues except the initial startup time and new window launch time. Since I always have a browser open on my machine the initial startup time isn't noticed and since I use tabs+tab-groups the new window time also doesn't matter, but it is a real pain when I /do/ want multiple windows.

Related, for anyone wanting a browser that has everything but the kitchen sink, SeaMonkey is still alive.

To me it makes perfect sense to combine e-mail and browser into one, with a single click you can either view your web tabs, or your e-mail.

I think what stopped me from switching to Vivaldi last time was lack of secure DNS with DoT or DoH, and no control over TLS 0RTT, which is a critical security hole masquerading as a performance optimization.

I would prefer a Vivaldi light version without all the bloat.

Ah, Netscape Communicator?

2006?

I'd use vivaldi if they improve their ui

> I'd use vivaldi if they improve their ui

Suggestions?

The interfaces are pretty customizable, so it's surprising to find that this is a particular problem--unless there's something specific.

One of the biggest complaints I've seen (and I've experienced firsthand) is that because Vivaldi is using a completely custom UI for their browser chrome, it's much slower than other other chromium-based browsers. For me, it takes 2-3 seconds from starting the application to being able to use it, thanks to the rendering is has to do.

Though I still use Vivaldi thanks to all the customization it offers.

Isn't a browser something you always have running? Genuinely curious. Yes, Vivaldi takes a couple seconds to launch, but how often do you launch your browser? For me a browser is one of those applications I'm always running and I rarely shutdown my computer except when applying updates so the launch time doesn't really affect me. Just wondering what you're doing different than I.

The slow startup applies to new Vivaldi windows, too, unfortunately. This affects me because I use windows instead of tabs for the most part. Tabs open quickly, but opening a new window is a 2-second lag.

Interesting! Yes, I rarely open new windows, I'm more of a "keep a thousand tabs open" kinda guy. I can see where that would be a real drag for your workflow.

When I work on audio, I only have my DAW open. I'm sure modern hardware can handle it, but force of habit really.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and use GarageBand and track guitar - all while running Vivaldi. Mind you I'm not doing anything crazy - my projects only ever have a few tracks and I prefer to record via an amp and microphone, but even when I use the amp and pedal sims my "virtual pedal board" has never had more than six pedals on it and I'm not using many plug-ins. If I did start having problems Vivaldi would be the first thing I'd shut down!

I'm into the realms of syncing video via SMPTE, a 500+ track template, clocking external synths and converters. Given how unstable computers used to be in terms of jitter, I daren't even have a file sync app open unless I need to sync a file. I'm sure they're capable of doing it these days with the number of cores available, just what you get conditioned into over time... :- ) Sometimes it's hard to believe technology could have possibly moved on as much as it inevitably has.

i honestly don't like their icons and paddings around the objects, maybe I'm nitpicking but those things go straight to my head.

Didn't know that they allow changing the css, will try that later

> i honestly don't like their icons and paddings around the objects

Under Appearance is "User Interface Zoom."

I'd use Vivaldi if it wasn't so very slow.

I don't get this. 3 comments (so far) from people claiming slowness. I've been using Vivaldi for my "time wasting" browser (Hacker News, Reddit, Techmeme etc.) for quite some time and never see any slowness. I launch it dozens of times each day. I have a 2+ year old i7-9750H with 16 GB of RAM and I always have Chrome with 4 tabs min, and Firefox with 2 tabs min open simultaneously with Vivaldi.

Perception is reality. One commenter above felt that the "2-3 seconds" it took Vivaldi to start up was intolerable. Every post about this browser is always flooded by people whose main benchmark is that if a browser does not match Chrome on subjective performance, it's shit. I don't get it either.

For me, tab tiling is an absolute killer app, unique to Vivaldi, and the somewhat slower UI performance than Chrome is well worth it just for that.

I think the people complaining about speed use new windows instead of tabs. I love Vivaldi but new windows take that 2-3 second load time meaning I don't even consider opening new windows outside very specific situations. Tab tiling alleviates this but then I have to remember different focus/bind schemes from my window manager.

You know where to find their issue tracker, help them help you?

I'd use it if the browser sync worked at all

> I'd use it if the browser sync worked at all

Out of curiosity, what doesn't work? I've had a few issues where I got logged out, but generally it's been pretty solid since intro.

If you know CSS, you can tinker with the actual browser UI.

/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css

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