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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#21

Post by bdash »

kibwen wrote: post #9
spicyj wrote: post #5

And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has been used by Safari since v5.1.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#22

Post by cpeterso »

lordlarm wrote: post #10

I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the last couple of years. Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company. I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers. A big loss for the general state of rendering plat…

I wonder if Opera is making an overture to get acquired by Google or Apple. Opera's innovative browser features have always been a bigger draw than the details of its Presto rendering engine.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#23

Post by wluu »

Interesting... I wonder if they'd now consider opening up their browser engine as an open source project?

Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#24

Post by zobzu »

kibwen wrote: post #9
spicyj wrote: post #5

And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

Those project are pretty damn cool. I have a preference for servo just because of it's high coolesness factor. Being in rust and even more modular.

Oh yeah also, while I guess it's missing a lot, the code is actually very, very readable. That's nice.

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/tree/master/src/servo (the actual layout engine part)

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#25

Post by jacques_chester »

afshinmeh wrote: post #14

Seems a great news but I can't really understand the benefits and differents between Gecko and Webkit, can someone say?

For historical reasons, Webkit has turned out to be much easier to work on than Gecko.

With Gecko you get heavy-duty OOP module system riding shotgun (XPCOM). That seems to be a sufficiently high barrier to contributors that only Mozilla are using Gecko with any seriousness.

Webkit has evolved out of a different history as a sorta-kinda standalone component of KDE to be much more approachable to outside contributions. Since Apple forked it from KHTML it's gone from strength to strength.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#26

Post by dbcooper »

kibwen wrote: post #9
spicyj wrote: post #5

And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

Doesn't Safari already use Webkit2?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#WebKit2

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#28

Post by drinchev »

As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain untouched for years.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misu...

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#29

Post by fpgeek »

Arelius wrote: post #20
lordlarm wrote: post #10

I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the last couple of years. Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company. I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers. A big loss for the general state of rendering plat…

It breaks my heart to know that Presto is going to most likely be left to bitrot in some SCM somewhere. But on the same note, I understand that using webkit will be better for Opera as a browser.

I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#30

Post by szalansky »

nkuttler wrote: post #18

"Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future." That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!

Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you, because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a different UI of the browser.

And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.

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