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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#41

Post by goldfeld »

andybak wrote: post #19

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…

Well, webkit being something open and contributed to by many players in collaboration, couldn't we think of it as part of the standard itself? There isn't some evil monopoly to be had in only having one rendering engine, as much as there isn't so in having web standard technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#42

Post by flyinRyan »

andybak wrote: post #19

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…

On the other hand, if all browsers just used webkit then maybe we'd finally get "write once, run anywhere" JS, CSS, etc.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#43

Post by bdash »

kibwen wrote: post #39
bdash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

Yes, I'm sure. The same core rendering engine, known as WebCore, is shared between both WebKit1 and WebKit2 on OS X. WebKit1 is used by most applications that use a WebView to display web content, while WebKit2 is used by Safari. The different API layers set up different delegate callbacks for WebCore so that they can tweak the behavior to fit their architecture (single process vs separate web and UI processes).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#44

Post by zobzu »

bdash wrote: post #35
zobzu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML layout engine was/is pretty much fine.

At http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-... they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation in general. A smaller portion are in the…

I tend to believe my own opinions rather than press releases :)

I'm sort of including domjs relations as part of the js problem tho.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#45

Post by blaabjerg »

Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years.

This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#46

Post by panacea »

andybak wrote: post #19

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…

Is a monoculture as bad as it might seem though? Front end web development is a clusterfuck. Webkit is open source, unlike the almost monoculture that ie6 represented. It can be forked and evolution can continue. Ditch -webkit -mos and -o. Like when the dinosaurs experienced a mass extinction event and mammals bloomed from a shrew into cats and humans.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#47

Post by drinchev »

flyinRyan wrote: post #42
andybak wrote: post #19

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…

On the other hand, if all browsers just used webkit then maybe we'd finally get "write once, run anywhere" JS, CSS, etc.

That's the most scary thing of all. Although open-sourced webkit is mostly developed by big companies ( Apple, Google, Adobe .. ). Webkit is not perfect. There are a lot of bugs that nobody cares and will care less. Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still people use their engine. Prefixes like '-webkit-animation' will remain forever and w3c specs will not be a significant for them.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#48

Post by gcp »

goldfeld wrote: post #41
andybak wrote: post #19

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…

Well, webkit being something open and contributed to by many players in collaboration, couldn't we think of it as part of the standard itself? There isn't some evil monopoly to be had in only having one rendering engine, as much as there isn't so in having web standard technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think bro…

The problem of having the standard defined by an implementation is that it makes it almost impossible to have another implementation.

This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need.

That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#49

Post by gcp »

kibwen wrote: post #39
bdash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#50

Post by gcp »

drinchev wrote: post #40
Arelius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while everyone else in the office uses chrome.

Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there…

Note that there's some fragmentation in WebKit as well. I think that developers that assume it will make their lives a lot easier will be slightly disappointed in the end.
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