Vivaldi Browser Launching Its Biggest Update Yet

Vivaldi 4.0, Translate and the beta of Vivaldi Mail, Calendar, and Feed Reader are some of the things coming in the update.

This update will arrive on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android devices. Vivaldi Translate, a built-in and privacy-focused translate service powered by Lingvanex.

Vivaldi Update Features and Highlights

The beta versions of Vivaldi Mail with Vivaldi Feed Reader and Vivaldi Calendar are now available on desktop, this mail beta works with existing mail and calendar services. Users can also set up an account on vivaldi.net or add a trusted third-party service, such as Fastmail.

Vivaldi states it never tracks its users, collects its data, or willingly compromises privacy. Vivaldi is committed to rejecting every privacy-invasive technology, such as Google’s FloC, as Vivaldi states is a “privacy-invasive tracking technology”.

Vivaldi’s end-to-end encrypted Sync keeps users’ browsing data safe, helps to limit unnecessary tracking, and block ads with built-in Ad and tracker blockers on both Android and desktop versions.  As Vivaldi states, the likes of Google Translate do not discard the translations, Google has access to every piece of text that is translated and can due to unreliable alternatives.

Along with Lingvanex, Vivaldi offers a translation feature built into the browser safely and securely. The Lingvanex translation engine is hosted on Vivaldi servers in Iceland, there are no third-party servers involved.

The translate icon appears in the right corner of the desktop browser’s Address Field by default. A full web page can be translated with a single click to either your OS language by default to choose from the languages in the drop-down, it can also be customised with the following options.

You can always translate the current language, never translate the current language, never translate for a particular site again, and disable the automatic translation of pages and pop-ups that show automatically, the button remains in the address field to reverse the action. These features also work on Android devices and Chromebooks with the same functionality as on desktop.

Vivaldi 4.0 offers different layouts to allow for a more customisable browser experience. The layouts are essentials, for those who like to keep it simple and want a more private browser that also does not track their browser usage, along with the ad and tracker blocker and translate features.

The classic layout adds panels and a status bar to the layout, giving new users instant and easy access to more productivity-boosting functionality. Fully loaded has the features from essentials and classic and also have new beta versions of Vivaldi Mail, Feed Reader, and Vivaldi Calendar.

Vivaldi Mail differs from your traditional mail app, as Jon von Tetzchner said “Unlike traditional mail clients, Vivaldi Mail does all the heavy lifting for you, even in its beta version. By automatically detecting mailing lists and mail threads, automatically categorizing mail to make it easy to find, and offering a powerful search feature, Vivaldi Mail takes the weight off your shoulders, allowing you to enjoy their mail experience again”.

When enabled going through settings > general, the mail beta offers a solution to the issues of other mail providers. It solves the issue of many mail accounts allowing access to all your emails in a single inbox, without having to log in to each account individually. It supports IMAP and POP3 so any email provider can be integrated.

People using Gmail can log in to their Google account from Vivaldi mail beta and the calendar beta. Vivaldi maintains a database of all messages, levels, filters, searches, etc. Mail from all of these accounts is indexed, therefore searchable offline, and if mails are prefetched, all the mail content is searchable too, even before opening it.

When composing a new message it opens a new tab, instead of popping up in the same window, this clutter-cutter allows multiple messages to be open simultaneously.

Organizing mail is also practical and easy in the mail beta, instead of storing a message in a particular folder a single message can show up in any number of folders or views. You can sync flags with other email clients assign colors to the mand spot important messages.

You can also save searches as filters, which is useful when running in the same search over and over. Labels can be synced, even when using a different client on another device.

Emails prepared in advance can be queued for later when one is not sure to send them. You can also toggle which mail to display by default, for example, a user can use the toggle to exclude mailing lists and custom folders from the unread view, then, most of the mails there will be direct mails while other mails will appear in dedicated views.

Unseen mails are those not seen before while unread are seen but not dealt with. Once you finish reading you can mark the mail as read and it will disappear from the unread view, it will remain in received for later access.

There are sixteen configurable shortcuts for activities such as composing new emails, replying, and more. The back and forward buttons in a mail window help navigate these mail folders.

Having selected a thread with T or contact with E, normal history keys can be used to go back and view the mail folder visited before.

The Vivaldi feed reader allows you to subscribe to feeds from sites they like and news from those sites will appear.  The feed reader uses the mail beta to display feed items, users can choose to view and rename the feed items within the mail panel its views from the dedicated Feeds Panel.

The integration of mail has huge benefits, allowing sorting, indexing, and searching of feed items, and even mark them as read without deleting them. It is a unified system where all messages can be viewed in one place, instead of having to find and view feeds separately from the mail.

There is also built-in YouTube support, allowing you to subscribe to a feed any time when visiting a channel. Vivaldi extracts the video it displays the video in the app and does not just give a link, it also will not trigger feed updates like someone liking a video you have on YouTube, etc.

It also gives support for several versions of RSS and the Atom web standards, the audio, and video of the podcast are glitch-free when received as a feed.

Vivaldi Calendar beta allows data to be kept locally for privacy as events will not be stored on third-party servers. It also allows access and management events from online calendars, new calendars can be added on the user’s server or any other CalDAV servers,

It also has support for online calendars like Fastmail, Zimbra, iCloud, etc. The unique thing is all data is visible in every view, while other calendars show only one or two lines per event.

There are three layouts, a minimal view that only shows the event title, a full view that shows all the event data in the main view and the compact view puts a cap on the text in the events. You can choose the zoom level of their data, day and week views show data by the hour, there are also multi-week and month views, and so on.

For more information check out the link here.