
Vivaldi: Why Email, History Features and Thank You
Thanks for all the feedback! I am here to take notes. And thanks to the Register, for making us laugh in spite of ourselves.
So I'm Molly, Developer Relations at Vivaldi, and I just wanted to pipe up and thank you for the feedback. Many of us at Vivaldi worked at Opera, I'm one of those people and I can honestly say the work they've done is incredible. So folks' loyalty makes complete sense to me both as a power user (there are many breeds of that IMO) and a person that has spent her life focused on standards as they are applied to browsers.
My hope is that you will have patience with us. There's a lot that's happened in recent years (an understatement!) and the changing face of the browser industry is, to me, endlessly fascinating. We have big goals and we're doing it with an approach that's not been done to this extent with a browser interface built on Open Web standards.
I can tell you with confidence that email is a top-priority for Vivaldi. We all want it, and no one wants it more than our CEO, pictured in this article, Jon. He himself is driving the effort so I can tell you with confidence this is not a far-off feature. We have a dedicated team working on it daily. When will it be available? Unknown. Will it meet all "power" needs at first rollout? C'mon, this is software. And, we are on task.
Our history feature (and related bugs) is another priority, and likely we will start seeing rapid improvements in our history management with upcoming snapshot releases.
Some people are questioning why an email client at all? This has to do with a core ideology at Vivaldi to focus on in-browser apps and features as opposed to third party extensions and plugins. You can already see this with our extended panel customization, extensive tab features and my new favorite - tab sessions. We support extensions and plugins because not doing so would limit users, and we want you to have choice. And, building a software product this extensive with Web technologies is pretty new territory. We use HTML, CSS, LESS Framework JS, ReactJS Framework - Open Web technologies all. We are constantly balancing performance and design, core and UI, in-browser apps such as email with plugin or extension methodologies.
Quality takes time. In the increasing demand for speed, performance, immediacy there must in my opinion be periods of stabilization, fixing things in the now rather in a promised future that we all know never comes and thinking carefully about our responsibility to ourselves and everyone to build a browser that ultimately meets its goal. I've been called "The Fairy Godmother" of the Web, but sadly, I don't have a magic sparkly wand to make the process go faster, and even if I did, I personally do not see any advantage of rushing the process. Getting it done and done well, hell yeah!
Thank you all so much for the feedback. Please feel free to come on over any time to our Vivaldi Forums, Twitter and Facebook pages for direct feature requests, where and how to report bugs and general discussion as it pertains to the Web and Vivaldi.
Yours from Arizona, USA - Yeeeee-HA!
Molly