![]() Indeed, he believes that collecting detailed telemetry about users only drives a company to build a product for the average user. “We have no need for or interest in collecting data on our users,” von Tetzchner told me (though it is collecting some basic aggregate data about how many users it has and where in the world they are). Those are your habits and preferences and none of our business.”Īll of this comes down to Vivaldi’s core philosophy of not being driven by advertising as its business model. We’re trying to basically give you - as a user - control over what you’re reading, what you’re subscribing to, and not learning about your habits or your preferences. But in my humble opinion, you subscribe to certain channels and that should be enough. “The news services now, they look at what you read and build profiles on you with the excuse that you then get more relevant news. “With feeds, it’s also about getting away from the collection,” he said. You can also subscribe to individual YouTube feeds (because even though YouTube doesn’t highlight this, every YouTube channel is still available as a feed). Whenever the browser finds an RSS feed as you are surfing the web, it will also highlight that in the URL bar, so subscribing to new feeds is about as easy as it gets. The overall implementation here works quite well, with the feed reader providing virtually all of the features you would need from a local feed reader. Von Tetzchner noted that he obviously wants to steer users away from Google and Microsoft, but he believes that providing alternatives isn’t good enough - they have to be better alternatives.Īs for the RSS reader, which is still pretty basic and doesn’t offer features like the ability to import and export lists of feeds yet, for example, the idea here is to help users leave their respective echo chambers but also avoid newsreaders that are focused on news suggestions. It looks better when the time slots are even, but functionally, it’s better that you actually can read more of the text.” Typically, with the calendars that are used today, the size of the space available for the text is dependent on the timeslot size. “But one of the things I wanted with the calendar, I wanted to be able to see all the content. “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.
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