> We have the C++ code as open source now. As far as making the rest of Vivaldi open source, we're still discussing the implications and want to make the best possible decision.
> The biggest features we are working on are sync and mail
Okay, I have to question this. Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?
I used Vivaldi a little bit ago during the beta/1.0 period for a few months—at that time at least, the UX needed more polish and there were bugs and usability issues that were daily pain points.
So I find this it concerning that they're building a mail client. They already have a browser and I already have a mail client. Why take developers off of working on the browser to provide me with a new mail client? It gives me the impression that this is fundamental to their strategy for building their browser UX—constant integration. What does this say about the future of Vivaldi development? I think I'd rather have a flexible UI that works for whatever I'm doing—NOT a bunch of integrations to various workflow points, some of which I really want and others I couldn't care for.
As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.
There are those of us who prefer having a well-integrated "Internet suite" (web browser, mail client), a la what Mozilla used to provide prior to the Firefox - Thunderbird split, or what Opera used to provide prior to being turned into a Chrome clone.
> As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.
I... uh, I'm not sure, or at least I hope that's not what they mean by building a mail client. Not having to use a shitty web-based interface is about 75% of why I'm using a mail client.
Yes, but at least passing interface events doesn't require issuing a HTTP request to some server located halfway across the globe, and it gets at least some of the native metaphors right.
It still looks and feels like a square peg in a round hole (not to mention slower than a drunk tortoise), but it's a little better than a web page thing.
It's awesome that they implement an email client. (hopefully open source)
Opera Mail and Thunderbird were good free email clients, but now discontinued.
What options are there (PC)? Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, Windows Live Mail/Outlook Express, Thunderbird, IBM Notes, OSX Mail.
Ideally, I would like an email client that is as powerful as Outlook, has the UI of Google mail (especially the conversation view), has superb IMAP support, runs on my PC and stores all emails on disk. What's disappointing is that many email clients still have no conversation view (or a broken one like Outlook), just a "sent" and "inbox" folder, and this in 2016.
I like Postbox, which is a commercial fork of Thunderbird. Seems to hit most of your needs (not sure about the conversation view as I always turn off threads) and has some of the keyboard shortcuts of GMail. Definitely lets you store emails on disk / offline. Alas version 4 has been less stable than version 3 was.
I currently use Postbox but heard that the company behind it was experiencing financial difficulties and a low user base (not sure how much of this is true).
Given that, I was going to wait until PB4 is no longer officially supported and make a full switch over to Thunderbird.
It's been so long since I used Thunderbird that I'm not sure. I don't know if Thunderbird has things like the Focus Pane, where I can live-filter my Inbox down to just certain topics or certain senders. It feels a bit like OmniFocus or a GTD / Getting Things Done workflow:
The killer app for me is the Postbox 4 feature to file a message in a folder just by pressing the V keyboard shortcut. Postbox then shows an Alfred/Spotlight-like "quick bar" with autocomplete - so just by typing "V GER" I can file an email in my "German Lessons" subfolder without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. They have a similar feature for automatically entering responses with a couple of keystrokes:
(I also like that Postbox prompts if it detects the word "attached" and you forget to add the attachment, but I assume most email clients have that now.)
- Expression search addon to filter/search the inbox.
- Nostalgy addon for moving mail (and navigating the mailbox only with the keyboard). This addon is basically required for serious usage. Just press b and a popup shows up and allows you tochoose folder with autocomplete.
It looks like this http://i.imgur.com/qYheafo.png
I took a look, and it does seem many of Postbox's features are renditions of Thunderbird addons, just with a slicker UI. Nostalgy has clearly been a big influence, and possibly Expression (though both are inspired by Gmail). I haven't found an addon for the focus sidebar, but I bet that's out there too.
My only issue is that during the years I used Thunderbird (pre Postbox) & exploring the addons, I never even knew about Nostalgy or Expression. For me, it's worth $20 for someone to design a pre-loaded Thunderbird with the best addons & make it part of the default UI & support docs. I would have easily taken $20+ of billable time just to discover & decide between the TB QuickMove and Quick Folder Move addons.
[But I'm really glad Thunderbird can do this, now I can recommend Nostalgy & TB to folks who don't want to pay for an email program.]
Postbox looks like a fully-featured fork and I'd be glad to support their awesome work with dollars, but sadly there's no Linux build: https://www.postbox-inc.com/download
Another is The Bat!. I've personally been using this email client for PC for 10 years now. https://www.ritlabs.com/en/
It has extremely powerful filtering, multiple inboxes for all my accounts (I prefer to deal with them separately rather than the unified inbox trend), IMAP and recently redone outlook.com/Exchange pipeline, can encrypt local store, and it's very customizable (can have it do threading/conversation for example). Reminds me of the old Opera in this regard.
The UI is a bit dated imo as it has stayed true to it's same look the whole time I've used it and skipping the modern trend of Outlook-like email client looks, but this to me is part of it's appeal. Once you get used to it.
> All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.
I've become really fond of notmuch[1]. It's basically a mail database and library with really fast search, tags, and native support for threads. Numerous front-ends exists[2]; I use the bundled emacs client, but have wanted to try out nevermore[3] (it did not work well with Evil last I checked).
How about Mutt? It's undeniably very powerful, and with its support for threading it's probably not that different from Gmail's "conversation view", with the added bonus that it won't read your emails and serve you adverts based on them!
Claws did me well on Mint. Lightweight. Worked well except with Gmail's tags. There was workaround but I just skipped it since web interface is fast on Gmail. Did you not know about Claws or have a specific reason for not mentioning it?
It is not free but eM Client[0] offers a "light" version of Outlook's UI and it has the best CalDAV/CardDAV support on Windows compared to Thunderbird + Lightning or 3rd party Outlook plugins.
Currently Version 7 is still in Beta but it is stable enough to be my daily driver and it offers some important features like a message thread view, which is still missing on their current, stable 6.0 release.
> Okay, I have to question this. Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?
Because Jon von Tetzchner (founder of Opera and Vivaldi) thinks having it in the browser is superior to having it as a separate app. It used to be like this in Opera as well. His goal is to provide an application with more value than just the stripped down browsers you see these days.
this really is the reason. He wants to remake Opera and is pretty clear about that. I never used Opera's email client so I don't really care but I know there are a lot of people who do.
I love Opera Mail but now that Opera is in Chinese hands I don't feel comfortable using it anymore. If Vivaldi does the mailer right, I will welcome it with open hands.
> Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?
Quite simple: They want to have an email client with features that are currently not offered by any other email client.
I may of course be ignorant, but beyond being integrated within the browser, can you tell me of an email client that uses 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?
I like that he mentioned VRML. Most people have forgotten about that tech which was supposed to be the next, big thing. I remember doing chat rooms made in it (similar to There game) and creating a few sites for emerging "VWWW." Fun stuff. Can't find original now.
Right. They're waving that around like they're saying the stuff is open source, and it's very much not open source. Building a bunch of stuff on top of an open source project and then claiming your source is open because some base amount of the source forced them under its license to be open is a total cop-out. No, Vivaldi is not open source, and no they do not have plans to ever open source Vivaldi.
What he calls out as stupid was the mistake of using those technologies for the UI.
Although I defended Vivaldi as the Opera Successor since its Beta, I stopped to support and suggest it because it failed to fix the js/css/HTML sluggishness with Version 1, and even more sadly with Version 1.2. I started using unofficial stable Chromium Builds with Codecs and Sync disabled via ChrLauncher and couldn't be happier.
What do you expect from a non native UI which is rendered by the Chromium extensions system? It only can be as fast as the used System is.
So, Vivaldi is nothing at all for people who value speed more than functions. But for people who value functions over speed, i can see that these could be drawn to it.
I'm pretty sure that they mean Vivaldi is unique as a browser built entirely using modern web technologies.
PS: I'm not saying they're right, I haven't researched to find out if there are other HTML/JS based browsers (aka with browser chrome built in HTML/JS).
It just loads other websites inside an iframe. That's how all similar web-based apps and web-OSs work. Eg there is also servo with its HTML based UI; there is WebOS with its browser, ChromeOS with its browser; FirefoxOS; etc - totally non unique beside it has a nice UI inspired by the old Opera 6-12 UI.
Different people use browsers differently? We're humans after all.
I never understood people whining about memory usage and having 120 tabs opened - - having so many tabs sounded silly - - now I'm one of those people. I just happened to start using my browser that way.
Umm... that's "visible source", not "open source".
I'm not sure if it needs to be open source to accomplish their goals (Opera isn't). But much of the tech crowd they're trying to reach won't use proprietary software. Come to think of it, I can't really tell what their business model is supposed to be.
Chrome is more proprietary than Vivaldi, and both based on the same open-source Chromium.
The main difference is that you can read the Vivaldi source code (even though it's not open source) whereas you really have no way of knowing what Google puts into its proprietary Chrome browser.
So, the techie audience that prefers open source should logically prefer Vivaldi to Chrome.
the browser is RATHER fast, but ui is single threaded, one tab can freeze the whole ui. also try to press and keep ctrl+t - it will froze, try this with other browsers - they are fine
in the reddit AMA linked elsewhere in the comments they were asked about it and said they were thinking about it so it isn't entirely out of the question that they will open source it.
What's so wrong about that? All the heavy browser lifting is done by the browser engine, which is native, and everything else is just... chrome. Which doesn't really have huge performance requirements.
I must admit, I do like the thought of `theme-color` support being integrated into desktop browsers. It works really well on mobile. I know it's a more complex task on the desktop where there are a multitude of browser customisiations and themes to take into consideration, but this looks like a good attempt.
In practice any kind of technology is only as good as its developers.
And I doubt that the security record of "Javascript based technologies" is better or worse than the security record of "C/C++ based technologies", for that matter.
As a purely theoretical point, "Javascript based technologies" have the advantage of automatic memory management, which, again, theoretically, removes an attack vector almost entirely.
Getting back on track, a browser is engine + UI. Vivaldi uses Chromium as the engine. HTML/JS are used just for the UI.
In that case they failed horribly, knowing what a security nightmare NPM modules are and having that embedded in my browser is 110% turning me off from ever wanting to install Vivaldi on anything that's not securely sandboxed away from the world at large.
I wonder why basically all new browser projects use Webkit / Blink, and none use Gecko)? This only strenghtens Google's position regarding the implementation of web standards. Recently Microsoft open sourced Chakra, their JS Engine, and there's to hope that it can compete with V8 to prevent the same for JavaScript.
Because embedding Gecko is markedly more difficult than embedding Blink / WebKit, and now that we’re heading towards a WebKit / Blink monoculture there’s no incentive to choose against that.
Interestingly, Servo is basing itself on Chromium’s embedding framework, so that should hopefully be a valid choice when it reaches maturity.
? When you use CEF, you're not building Chromium so I don't understand why Servo's compilation toolchain would affect an application that just wants to embed. Libraries written in Rust can be easily called from C code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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:
> Our source code package is available here: vivaldi.com/source. This links to a copy of the Chromium source code with the changes we made to allow our HTML/CSS/JS UI to run.
> All our changes to Chromium source code are under a BSD license and hence can read by anyone. The details are explained in the the README and LICENSE files, within that package.
> In addition, all of our UI code (included in normal packages) is written in plain, readable text. This means that all parts of Vivaldi are full audit-able and open from that perspective.
I remember seeing the mouse gestures in Opera and wanting the same feature in my Firefox. I used this in Firefox with an extension for several years and later did the same with Chrome.
Now with Vivaldi I accidentally performed a mouse gesture due to muscle memory and to my surprise it worked out of the box.
With the same people behind it this browser seems to be the real successor for Opera. :)
I really like the browser, but still doesn't work with Apple Keychain so using it is not an option here. Guess I'm too lazy but it would take weeks to migrate over, and then I'd need to store the passwords in dual locations, which seems like a bad idea.
What is the experience on laptops? I tried Vivaldi 1.0 or 1.1 and it drained the battery like nothing I have seen before as far as browsers go. Not sure if that is a Chromium or Vivaldi issue.
Vivaldi features are not that bad, but the fact that this "browser" is only a combination of some extensions bundled with Chromium is a big downside.
Also, not being able to implement more privacy for example fingerprint block is also rather bad. All they do is work inside their extensions related code with avoiding to touch actual Chromium code base.
When these guys have finally more knowledge about Chromium to either enhance it or remove unused parts - Vivaldi UI exists outside of Chromium and they carry all that Chromium luggage around which they also not using at all which means tons of dead weight - then this browser COULD be useful - of course only when Open Sourcing it 100% - but before, not even worth thinking about it.
You can use chrome plugins/the chrome webstore and the devs have actually pushed bug fixes that address compatibility with prominent plugins, i.e. Chromecast and LastPass
I've been on Vivaldi from the beta days, and am glad to see it's been steadily improving.
On my Mac, it's extremely responsive, probably as good as Safari. It feels snappier than chrome or (god forbid) firefox. Page load speeds feel quicker than other browsers. It's as stable as anything else I've used. The chrome extensions I use all work well.
All in all, a very positive experience. I just switched to Vivaldi as my main browser after using v1.2 for a couple of days now.
I only wish they bring some of the old opera features like text reflow, user CSS for page rendering, etc.
133 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread> We have the C++ code as open source now. As far as making the rest of Vivaldi open source, we're still discussing the implications and want to make the best possible decision.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_t...
Okay, I have to question this. Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?
I used Vivaldi a little bit ago during the beta/1.0 period for a few months—at that time at least, the UX needed more polish and there were bugs and usability issues that were daily pain points.
So I find this it concerning that they're building a mail client. They already have a browser and I already have a mail client. Why take developers off of working on the browser to provide me with a new mail client? It gives me the impression that this is fundamental to their strategy for building their browser UX—constant integration. What does this say about the future of Vivaldi development? I think I'd rather have a flexible UI that works for whatever I'm doing—NOT a bunch of integrations to various workflow points, some of which I really want and others I couldn't care for.
As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.
They're still be missing the IRC and torrent clients :)
> As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.
I... uh, I'm not sure, or at least I hope that's not what they mean by building a mail client. Not having to use a shitty web-based interface is about 75% of why I'm using a mail client.
It still looks and feels like a square peg in a round hole (not to mention slower than a drunk tortoise), but it's a little better than a web page thing.
Opera Mail and Thunderbird were good free email clients, but now discontinued.
What options are there (PC)? Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, Windows Live Mail/Outlook Express, Thunderbird, IBM Notes, OSX Mail.
Ideally, I would like an email client that is as powerful as Outlook, has the UI of Google mail (especially the conversation view), has superb IMAP support, runs on my PC and stores all emails on disk. What's disappointing is that many email clients still have no conversation view (or a broken one like Outlook), just a "sent" and "inbox" folder, and this in 2016.
(Not free, but $20 is pretty cheap.)
Given that, I was going to wait until PB4 is no longer officially supported and make a full switch over to Thunderbird.
http://www.softwarecrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/postb...
The killer app for me is the Postbox 4 feature to file a message in a folder just by pressing the V keyboard shortcut. Postbox then shows an Alfred/Spotlight-like "quick bar" with autocomplete - so just by typing "V GER" I can file an email in my "German Lessons" subfolder without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. They have a similar feature for automatically entering responses with a couple of keystrokes:
https://www.postbox-inc.com/blog/entry/postbox-4-quick-bar
(I also like that Postbox prompts if it detects the word "attached" and you forget to add the attachment, but I assume most email clients have that now.)
- Expression search addon to filter/search the inbox.
- Nostalgy addon for moving mail (and navigating the mailbox only with the keyboard). This addon is basically required for serious usage. Just press b and a popup shows up and allows you tochoose folder with autocomplete. It looks like this http://i.imgur.com/qYheafo.png
My only issue is that during the years I used Thunderbird (pre Postbox) & exploring the addons, I never even knew about Nostalgy or Expression. For me, it's worth $20 for someone to design a pre-loaded Thunderbird with the best addons & make it part of the default UI & support docs. I would have easily taken $20+ of billable time just to discover & decide between the TB QuickMove and Quick Folder Move addons.
[But I'm really glad Thunderbird can do this, now I can recommend Nostalgy & TB to folks who don't want to pay for an email program.]
for my desires - all of them sucks anyway, not providing basic features that are needed and bloating the client with thing almost-nobody-need
It has extremely powerful filtering, multiple inboxes for all my accounts (I prefer to deal with them separately rather than the unified inbox trend), IMAP and recently redone outlook.com/Exchange pipeline, can encrypt local store, and it's very customizable (can have it do threading/conversation for example). Reminds me of the old Opera in this regard.
The UI is a bit dated imo as it has stayed true to it's same look the whole time I've used it and skipping the modern trend of Outlook-like email client looks, but this to me is part of it's appeal. Once you get used to it.
> All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.
I've become really fond of notmuch[1]. It's basically a mail database and library with really fast search, tags, and native support for threads. Numerous front-ends exists[2]; I use the bundled emacs client, but have wanted to try out nevermore[3] (it did not work well with Evil last I checked).
0: http://www.mutt.org/
1: https://notmuchmail.org/
2: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
3: https://github.com/tjim/nevermore
* Canary: http://canarymail.io (in beta)
* Airmail: http://airmailapp.com
* Polymail: https://polymail.io (in beta and currently Google-only, ironically, given its name)
* CloudMagic: https://cloudmagic.com
* Postbox: https://www.postbox-inc.com
Currently Version 7 is still in Beta but it is stable enough to be my daily driver and it offers some important features like a message thread view, which is still missing on their current, stable 6.0 release.
[0] http://www.emclient.com/?lang=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Because Jon von Tetzchner (founder of Opera and Vivaldi) thinks having it in the browser is superior to having it as a separate app. It used to be like this in Opera as well. His goal is to provide an application with more value than just the stripped down browsers you see these days.
You mean, "browsers".
Quite simple: They want to have an email client with features that are currently not offered by any other email client.
I may of course be ignorant, but beyond being integrated within the browser, can you tell me of an email client that uses 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?
Because the folks at Slack haven't put a browser into their chat client yet?
https://vivaldi.com/source/
Nor is the source provided there complete. The last time they were asked, they said only the C++ code is open and available to the public.
Otherwise, excellent browser.
If a company is making this stupid statement on the first page I can imagine the rest.
Although I defended Vivaldi as the Opera Successor since its Beta, I stopped to support and suggest it because it failed to fix the js/css/HTML sluggishness with Version 1, and even more sadly with Version 1.2. I started using unofficial stable Chromium Builds with Codecs and Sync disabled via ChrLauncher and couldn't be happier.
So, Vivaldi is nothing at all for people who value speed more than functions. But for people who value functions over speed, i can see that these could be drawn to it.
I'm pretty sure that they mean Vivaldi is unique as a browser built entirely using modern web technologies.
PS: I'm not saying they're right, I haven't researched to find out if there are other HTML/JS based browsers (aka with browser chrome built in HTML/JS).
What a joke.
It just loads other websites inside an iframe. That's how all similar web-based apps and web-OSs work. Eg there is also servo with its HTML based UI; there is WebOS with its browser, ChromeOS with its browser; FirefoxOS; etc - totally non unique beside it has a nice UI inspired by the old Opera 6-12 UI.
I never understood people whining about memory usage and having 120 tabs opened - - having so many tabs sounded silly - - now I'm one of those people. I just happened to start using my browser that way.
Different people, different needs.
Umm... that's "visible source", not "open source".
I'm not sure if it needs to be open source to accomplish their goals (Opera isn't). But much of the tech crowd they're trying to reach won't use proprietary software. Come to think of it, I can't really tell what their business model is supposed to be.
However, Vivaldi is a small operation so it doesn't need many users.
Also, it's self-financed so there are no outside investors and the founder can do whatever he wants.
> much of the tech crowd they're trying to reach won't use proprietary software
You do realize that Chrome is proprietary, as are Safari and IE/Edge? No tech users at all?
Gmail is also proprietary....
Chrome is a build of the (completely open-source) Chromium browser, with some additional media codecs and a different logo slapped on it.
Also chrome integrates with service that Are closed source. Eg forsync
The main difference is that you can read the Vivaldi source code (even though it's not open source) whereas you really have no way of knowing what Google puts into its proprietary Chrome browser.
So, the techie audience that prefers open source should logically prefer Vivaldi to Chrome.
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui...
And I doubt that the security record of "Javascript based technologies" is better or worse than the security record of "C/C++ based technologies", for that matter.
As a purely theoretical point, "Javascript based technologies" have the advantage of automatic memory management, which, again, theoretically, removes an attack vector almost entirely.
Getting back on track, a browser is engine + UI. Vivaldi uses Chromium as the engine. HTML/JS are used just for the UI.
I don't know what percentage you need to have it be "based", but we're getting there...
Does this make any difference to the user?
Interestingly, Servo is basing itself on Chromium’s embedding framework, so that should hopefully be a valid choice when it reaches maturity.
Rust introduces several new toolchain requirements, though.
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.
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.
Pick any two.
The full Opera installer was something like 5MB for a full browser + email/RSS client + IRC client + torrent client.
It also synced IMAP from scratch way faster, too.
edit: The search was incredible as well
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://vivaldi.com/source/
From https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...
> Our source code package is available here: vivaldi.com/source. This links to a copy of the Chromium source code with the changes we made to allow our HTML/CSS/JS UI to run.
> All our changes to Chromium source code are under a BSD license and hence can read by anyone. The details are explained in the the README and LICENSE files, within that package.
> In addition, all of our UI code (included in normal packages) is written in plain, readable text. This means that all parts of Vivaldi are full audit-able and open from that perspective.
- Chrome plugins
- tabs configurable at the side instead of on top
- native (?) mousegestures
So far so good!
With the same people behind it this browser seems to be the real successor for Opera. :)
Also, not being able to implement more privacy for example fingerprint block is also rather bad. All they do is work inside their extensions related code with avoiding to touch actual Chromium code base.
When these guys have finally more knowledge about Chromium to either enhance it or remove unused parts - Vivaldi UI exists outside of Chromium and they carry all that Chromium luggage around which they also not using at all which means tons of dead weight - then this browser COULD be useful - of course only when Open Sourcing it 100% - but before, not even worth thinking about it.
Can you use chrome plugins for vivaldi?
On my Mac, it's extremely responsive, probably as good as Safari. It feels snappier than chrome or (god forbid) firefox. Page load speeds feel quicker than other browsers. It's as stable as anything else I've used. The chrome extensions I use all work well.
All in all, a very positive experience. I just switched to Vivaldi as my main browser after using v1.2 for a couple of days now.
I only wish they bring some of the old opera features like text reflow, user CSS for page rendering, etc.