Vivaldi Email Client Released 7 Years After First Announcement (theregister.com) 42
Browser maker Vivaldi's email client has finally hit version 1.0, seven years after it was first announced. From a report: Vivaldi Mail, which includes a calendar and feed reader as well as an email client, first arrived in technical preview in 2020. A slightly wobbly beta arrived last year alongside version 4 of the Chromium-based browser. After another year of polish and tidying of loose ends, the company has declared the client ready.
As before, the client is built into the browser, meaning it is unlikely to appeal to many beyond Vivaldi's existing user base. Enabling it is a simple matter of dropping into Settings pages and wading through until the option to enable Mail, Calendar, and Feeds can be selected. Vivaldi has a lot of settings -- delightfully customizable for some and downright baffling for others. That said, for users still pining for a good old-fashioned email client that doesn't require wading through a web page festooned with adverts, there's a lot to like. It supports multiple accounts, will sort messages and create folders automatically (locally, rather than on a mystery server in the cloud), and permits searching (with indexing performed offline). IMAP and POP3 are supported, making adding a provider relatively straightforward, and the company also claims that users can log into their Google accounts from Mail and Calendar.
As before, the client is built into the browser, meaning it is unlikely to appeal to many beyond Vivaldi's existing user base. Enabling it is a simple matter of dropping into Settings pages and wading through until the option to enable Mail, Calendar, and Feeds can be selected. Vivaldi has a lot of settings -- delightfully customizable for some and downright baffling for others. That said, for users still pining for a good old-fashioned email client that doesn't require wading through a web page festooned with adverts, there's a lot to like. It supports multiple accounts, will sort messages and create folders automatically (locally, rather than on a mystery server in the cloud), and permits searching (with indexing performed offline). IMAP and POP3 are supported, making adding a provider relatively straightforward, and the company also claims that users can log into their Google accounts from Mail and Calendar.
Missing the details that matter (Score:2)
2. What does it look like?
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2/ Like shit.
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Being “privacy first” is not something we say lightly. We don’t track you. And we mean it. Nothing, zero, zilch. Making the browser is our job. How you use it is none of our business.
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Crap, let me do some research and find out.
Ah!
https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]
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Thank you for your dedication and hard work.
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Meh (Score:2)
Re: Meh (Score:5, Informative)
They're all variants of WebKit. Except Firefox.
But if you ever used Opera (pre-v8 when it sold to China), then you'd see Vivaldi is more like an Opera variant.
Opera was a browser for power users. It was an integrated platform for various Internet protocols; a one stop shop where you could say, ok, all this Internet shit? That's this app.
Re: Meh (Score:2)
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They're all variants of WebKit
Just clarification. The only major browser to continue to use WebKit is Safari. There's obvious minor ones like GNOME Web that uses it too. Blink is a fork of WebKit's WebCore because Google got tired of having to deal with cooperating with Apple. Everything else pretty much runs on that now and Google is kind of the final say on what does and does not get into Blink.
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Opera was a browser for power users. It was an integrated platform for various Internet protocols; a one stop shop where you could say, ok, all this Internet shit? That's this app.
How is that a browser for power users? As one, I prefer to open different "internet shit" in different clients that are each individually best suited to different protocols and types of content, and explicitly do not want a one stop shop that does everything poorly. That's the opposite of a power user tool.
Re: Meh (Score:2)
Massively customizable, integrated system for snippets, custom sidebars backed by web pages, linking tabs to other tab targets, mini-views of pages, link pre-fetching, tab stacks, etc. et al.
Programmers are power users and they use IDEs to do all the related things in one place. Same idea.
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Unfortunately, while I get that vibe from the design, but it's been a bit... glitchy and I gave up on it as a primary browser.
Email client in a browser... (Score:2)
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Because people who use email also tend to browse the web. Because it's the way the old school "Internet portals" used to do it, AOL, Mozilla, etc.
They may be trying to monetize the browser component and so use this as bait to get people into the ecosystem.
They may have limited development capacity and bolting on features to an existing GUI/pipeline is easier than refactoring things for a separate release.
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... even after reading all of Vivaldi's hype about how great that is, I still do not see the reasoning for tying a browser anchor onto an email client.
Because most people always have both open constantly and (at least for me) it greatly speeds up workflow (not to mention, it also speeds up my cpu as it uses far less ram than constantly running two separate programs)
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The question is whether it is particularly better than say, just opening the mail providers web ui...
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Quite some are disappointed by WYSIWYG implementation in Outlook web front-end. When used professionally, it is not uncommon to send visual crap to your peers, because it was shown different to you while composing. There is opportunity for solid, well working, well organizing mail client, able to connect to major mail service providers. Including Protonmail, hopefully.
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I've been using the web version of Outlook and the desktop version, so I think I can answer your question, at least for that particular example. The web version is much less capable, in the sense that there are things I can easily do with the desktop version that I can't with the web version. For example, I can use the key shortcuts with the desktop version, but I'm forced to use the mouse for the web version (I am not a mouse lover). There are many more settings on the desktop version, and it retains t
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Keyboard shortcuts can be supported in a web page, if an web site does not support it's because they chose not to, not because they can't. Similarly, settings can be retained within a browser, either saved to the server for multi-browser, or alternative in localstorage, again an application not bothering is a choice by the application, not a limitation of the browser.
But sure, you may like an email client UI better than the one provided by the owner of your email domain. That seems reasonable, but I think
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Re: Email client in a browser... (Score:2)
It's objectively better than opening a tab to webmail.
As far as why you'd use Vivaldi instead of Outlook or Thunderbird, besides aesthetic choices, the integration into the browser can be really nice if you spend a lot of your day in email and websites. Having one place to set common settings that work consistently across the various tasks.
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People need to realize that storing more than 6 month's worth of data on a US server outside of your control means, you've effectively declared it 'abandoned' and the warrant process is not really necessary.
What does that have to do with anything? It doesn't matter what client or protocol you are using, retention is an entirely separate issue. Also, I'm not stupid enough to send anything incriminating through email, so I don't care if someone is doing warrantless searches of mine. Or frankly, anyone else's. Anyone stupid enough to use email that way deserves to be locked up before they accidentally drool on something important.
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Think about it. People that tend to use webmail services like gmail probably store their entire email data collection on Google's servers because search + storage is so fast and convenient for one thing. IMAP is the most practical method I'm aware of to effectively manage resources and privacy requirements practically, and you and I seem to be in agreement here on this tech site. I just raised the issue is all. Until now, Thunderbird was the only maintained IMAP cli
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I'm not stupid enough to send anything incriminating through email, so I don't care if someone is doing warrantless searches of mine.
Do not talk to the police, even if you BELIEVE you have nothing to hide. At least make them do their job.
Oh, for sure. Even if they can just get a rubber stamp warrant from a compliant (and/or complicit) judge, you want that to happen so there's a paper trail. And you never want to talk to police without legal counsel, though they have you over a bit of a barrel when it comes to traffic stops if you want to go home.
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Because Zawinski's Law [catb.org].
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That's why every e-mail client does.
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e-mail is happy with nothing but a text medium. You need a browser only if you send web pages instead of e-mail. Critters who do that have either migrated to messengers bundled with this week's Myspace remake (home and small company users) or require Outlook specifically (corpo).
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If you want to format them, that is how you do it.
And people want to format them.
Unfortunately (Score:2)
I'm not sure what's more mysterious, that it took seven years to get to this point, or that there's about 30 years of better examples to draw upon... Regardless, I wouldn't pitch Thunderbird just yet, Maybe in another seven years
Re: Unfortunately (Score:2)
I prefer Mailbird (Score:2)
Re: I prefer Mailbird (Score:2)
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When microsoft decided to kill Exchange client for Windows 95, I still installed it on win2k because, you know, it was possible. And then it just wasn't there any more, but hey Mozilla to the rescue, Thunderbird is the only client worth having. Sure, the search is strange and opens up a stupid window that make you click on "show as list" to find the message you're looking for and setup of accounts you have to know every effing detail before they let you do a connection check.
But still way better than all th
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I was a huge fan of Outlook Express, I thought they really nailed the email client there.
After it was binned, I switched grudgingly to Window's Live Mail, and it's still working, but now Gmail has cut off support for 'old' POP/SMTP connections (can still use newer Outlook versions, but since WLM hasn't been updated in a decade or so..) WLM was fine tho, but it had a critical bug that if you tried to send an email to an illegitimate email address, it would lock up the whole POP/SMTP process, and you'd have t
Slightly surprised (Score:2)
Not going to lie. I'm slightly shocked at the lack of folks telling us all about SeaMonkey. Usually the second something about web browsers appears on Slashdot, everyone is out to proselytize us all on why the one indicated in the story sucks and why their particular browser is the best.
So that said. SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org]. It's like a modern version of the browser you would have used back in 2005, because it's literally a split from the Mozilla foundation's project when they decided to focus on Firefox and Thunderbi
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Vivaldi's 28 seasons, I presume? (Score:2)
7*4