In 1996, Netscape - who would later become Mozilla - launched a new suite of tools called Netscape Communicator. The core of this suite was Netscape Navigator, their flagship web browser, but also bundled was mail, newsgroups, and an html editor. The web has largely been going downhill since then.
Navigator eventually became Firefox, the mail client later became Thunderbird). Most recently, Mozilla has continued to invest heavily in boondoggle AI projects and is now throwing everything it has at AI for Advertising. Of course, no user of Firefox wants any of that garbage.
I recently gave up on Firefox and migrated to Vivaldi - a free browser that’s forked from Chromium, but with entirely new features and a different interface. Being built on Chromium means that all of your favorite Google Chrome extensions work out of the box, I haven’t seen any problems with compatibility so far.
However, the browser is just a small part of the Vivaldi suite. There are integrated mail and calendar clients which are streamlined and work fine for my purposes. They integrate seamlessly with Gmail, but I have not quite gotten the Protonmail bridge to work with them yet. There’s also a very basic RSS reader, which has folders but lacks the refined details of a paid solution. All of these live within the browser itself, but the performance still feels much snappier than Firefox.
Vivaldi is the closest we’ve been to Netscape Communicator for decades, and I hope this marks a turning point in the web moving away from the 2.0 and 3.0 nonsense and back towards simpler roots. If you’re tired of the tyranny of Google and Mozilla, I hope you’ll give it a try!