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by lucideer 3628 days ago
It does email at least, and maybe bittorrent and chat.

The native feel seems largely to have been Opera 12's downfall; they just didn't have the resources/manpower to maintain their own (very brilliant) internals/rendering engine/etc. on top of the power-user UI + featureset.

Vivaldi looks to be attempting to recreate the latter (poweruser UI+features) and dropping the former (by relying on Chromium/ReactJS for internals), so it's very much a large compromise if you like Opera 12.

Overall, the main criticism I would have is not opensourcing it. This is an old tired argument, but in this specific case it's painfully relevant given the huge resources that went into creating Opera 12's internals which then couldn't be community-forked.

2 comments

> The native feel seems largely to have been Opera 12's downfall; they just didn't have the resources/manpower to maintain their own

Nope.

What happened is that they started getting more and more into the ad business as a way to make real income, and they got very successful in the mobile area with that, to the point that they didn't need the browser anymore. All it took after that was a bunch of MBAs to have the smart idea to convert the browser to a token marketing effort, edge out the founders' ideas, and pivot towards the ad business full force.

I don't see email on their feature page, but I also am not going to download it to see.

But I agree, the lack of opensource seems very unfortunate in this case, since closed source is part of what got you stuck here. I guess I'm not power user enough to want to add what just seems to be more or less a different version of Chrome, but I'm glad it exists because I'm glad that some projects still dedicate themselves to a power user base.

Ah yes, you're right. Mail is still an upcoming feature. They're calling it "M3"...