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  >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!

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 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.

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 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.

> 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.

>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.

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

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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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-...