“I think we have done things differently. Von Tetzchner tells me that this is very much his preference. One interesting design twist here is that the team decided to show all the data available for an event right in the calendar instead of just one or two lines per event. The new built-in calendar, too, supports most of the standard calendar providers, including Google Calendar and iCloud, for example. And now at Vivaldi, we are doing those things, but also a lot more. And, I mean, we obviously did a lot of those things at Opera - some of them we didn’t - and we are filling a gap with what Opera used to be doing. “So having a good client for that, that’s kind of where we’re coming from. Most all of us use email - at varying levels, some of use it a lot, some less, but everyone basically has at least one email account,” he said. We rather focus on what the users want.’ And I think there’s a significant value. “We’ve chosen to say, ‘okay, we don’t want to have the business model decide what we do. Von Tetzchner argues that for a lot of browser vendors, doing away with those features was about steering users into certain directions (including their own webmail clients). But building an offline email client into the browser - as well as a calendar client - almost feels like a return to the early days of browsers, like Netscape Navigator and Opera, when having these additional built-in features was almost standard. The company has long offered a webmail service, for example. Today, the Vivaldi team is launching version 4.0 of its browser and with that, it’s introducing a slew of new features that, among many other things, include the beta of new built-in mail, calendar and RSS clients, as well as the launch of Vivaldi Translate, a privacy-friendly translation service hosted on the company’s own servers and powered by Lingvanex. Vivaldi has always been one of the more interesting of the Chromium-based browsers, in no small part thanks to its emphasis on building tools for power users in a privacy-centric package, but also because of its pedigree, with Opera’s outspoken former CEO Jon von Tetzchner as its co-founder and CEO.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |