Original MuyLinux note
To read J Pomeyrol’s original in Spanish, click here
If we stick to the results of our end-of-year survey, Vivaldi is not one of the most popular web browsers around here, which surprises me a bit considering that together with Firefox it is the one that offers the most possibilities at the level of functionality for users advanced. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t use Vivaldi to navigate, because you can use it as a productivity suite, in the event that those available for Linux -or Windows and macOS- do not convince you at all.
By productivity suite or PIM (Personal Information Manager) we understand applications such as Evolution, Kontact or Thunderbid, which combine under the same roof an email manager, calendar, contacts and others. Well, Vivaldi is about to become one of them and even if you are not interested in using it as a browser, you can do it independently for such tasks and some more … or some less, since you can choose what to use and what not. It is not all or nothing.
However, I say that Vivaldi is about to become a complete productivity solution because these functions are currently in the testing phase, so you may want to wait until they are released as stable to test it in depth. I can only tell you that I have been using it for almost a month and everything works very well, not in vain the development of these features began years ago and it has been used internally in Vivaldi for quite some time as well.
From the preview of Vivaldi Mail and company I reported in depth at the end of November in MC, but we are going to review everything that is worth it. Furthermore, if the activation of these new components was only available in the beta version then, it is already available in the stable version, indicating that it is getting closer and closer to reaching the bulk of Vivaldi users.
A note: for this article I have used both promotional images of Vivaldi and captures made by me, so you will see some in English and others in Spanish.
Vivaldi Mail
Vivaldi Mail is the culmination of one of the promises with which this browser was born: to recover the functionality that Opera once offered. This is the great purpose - but not the only one - of Vivaldi, founded by who also founded Opera, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. Thus, it is not surprising that Vivaldi Mail is very reminiscent of that one.
In short, Vivaldi Mail is an email client integrated into the browser, but that does not mean it lacks options, quite the contrary: POP3, IMAP and SMTP support, unified or independent inboxes, personalized folders to better organize messages , filters, labels, indicators, search, offline support… Vivaldi Mail has all the options that you would expect to find in any application of its category and a very well achieved design.
Of course, you can use Vivaldi Mail with any mail service that supports the aforementioned protocols, which are practically all with the exception of those that use endpoint encryption (with the exception, worth the redundancy, of ProtonMail, which already has a solution for this particularity ).
Another fact to take into consideration is that Vivaldi Mail does not affect the consumption of the browser too much. I have tried it with four accounts at the same time and it consumes less than using Kontact (KMail) or Evolution. In addition, the integration with the desktop is very good: it respects native window dialogs, notifications and can be added as a default mail client.
Vivaldi Calendar
The activation of Vivaldi Mail brings with it that of Vivaldi Calendar, a calendar application that is also at a very good level. Like the previous one, it can be used with any calendar service that offers support for the standard protocol (CalDAV), with the addition that it allows the use of local accounts and calendars whose data does not leave the computer.
Other Vivaldi Calendar options include year, month, week, day and agenda view; scheduling events by date and time, by location, description and URL; Recurring events, task mode with boxes and private or shared calendars. At the level of functions it is very complete and the design and usability accompany it.
If something is missing from the combo of mail manager and calendar, it is integration between both, so that you can create events or tasks from messages, but it should be remembered that the software is still in testing and knowing how they work in Vivaldi , Everything will go.
For more information about Vivaldi Mail and Calendar, the official feature article.
Other functions
Although the mail manager and calendar are the most powerful of the suite in terms of organization, they are not the only thing there is. In the style of Thunderbid, Vivaldi Mail includes an RSS reader. In my opinion, this is the poorest aspect of the whole set … although perhaps I think so because I am an intensive RSS user and it falls very short. I also do not like that it is integrated into the same interface of the mail client, but according to comments, this could change in the future.
Another element that is not referenced from Vivaldi is the contact manager, which appears in the side panel of the browser when the mail and calendar are activated, and it is not bad at all because of how it integrates with the first. It is very simple, but once you have configured the email account, it shows all the contacts linked to it and when selecting a specific one, the email view opens with all the conversations in which that contact participates.
Apart from all the above, Vivaldi offers more functions that are really useful for managing personal information and that are also available in stable form for all users. For example, the bookmarks system, common to any other browser, but far superior in terms of functionality due to its design, although it is not exempt from details to improve.
In this sense, the notes application stands out, very useful for taking quick or complex notes, since it has MarkDown support; as well as to save links or text fragments of web pages and screenshots in the purest style of Evernote and the like. Only the design fails, as both the side panel and the full view are not ergonomic due to the vertical arrangement it uses. But it is a most interesting addition to the whole.
And I can not forget to mention the side panel, essential for a full management of the mail manager, but also to take full advantage of functions such as bookmarks and notes, which have their own section in the browser, but also can be accessed quickly this way. The same happens with the calendar and with any other site that you want to link to to increase Vivaldi’s productivity capabilities: there you can anchor, for example, messaging services that have a web version.
Finally, it should be noted that Vivaldi offers for free and with a very consistent privacy policy -basically, they pass on your data- an email service that includes a calendar based on the open source Roundcube software and that anyone who opens An account -the same one that is used to synchronize the data between different devices- can be used to have an online calendar without pulling the usual (Google, Microsoft, etc).
How to activate it
As I have pointed out before, the email manager, the calendar, the RSS reader and the contact manager are still in the testing phase and must be activated before they can be used. Theirs would be to wait for them to be available in a stable way, which should not take long to happen; But whoever wants to try everything now, can activate it by accessing the following internal URL:
vivaldi://experiments/
And by checking the corresponding box (Calendar, Mail & Feeds).
There’s no more.
In fact, there is much more, but in this article I have referred to everything that Vivaldi can do for now in terms of personal productivity, without going into its capabilities as a web browser, which also has them and some are very interesting (others need some polishing, not perfect). Otherwise, this would be excessively elongated.
The fact of the matter is that even if you don’t want to use it as a web browser, as a productivity suite it is - or will be shortly, when it is launched as stable - an option to take into account especially in Linux, where this is not abundant type of solutions. The downside of all this is that Vivaldi is not free software, but they have a lot of transparency with the development and their privacy policies have nothing to do with those of the giants of the sector.