I never adopted the new version of Opera so I was delighted to discover that Vivaldi had been released by Jon von Tetzchner with a similar design philosophy to that of the original Opera, with a promise of a built-in email client and a high degree of customisability.Īfter reading the review below, you will realise that, though much has been achieved already, Vivaldi still has some way to go to reach the same level of control that we enjoyed in Opera for over a decade. This marked a change of direction, and long-term Opera users like me. In 2013 Opera dropped the Presto layout engine in favour of Blink, and it was bought up by a Chinese consortium for $600 million in 2016. Opera used its own Presto rendering engine, but it was hard to support web sites that did not follow web standards. I have restored and updated this review page for the benefit of those Vivaldi users who do not know the background of the original Opera browser co-founded by Jon von Tetzchner, the current CEO of Vivaldi. I no longer need to launch Opera 12.18 to send and receive emails, since Vivaldi now has a built-in email client. Being able to check and send email while browsing is as useful as it ever was. Opera 5.0 became my primary browser in 2001, when it was recommended to me for its built-in email client.

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