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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#51

Post by simonw »

gcp wrote: post #48
goldfeld wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

"This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need." - this is a very smart way of putting it.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#52

Post by jaytaylor »

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…

>> I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low.

Bad developers are already ignoring everything except whatever single browser they [might have] tested in.

This move certainly is unsettling, but I think you can come up with a better argument about why.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#53

Post by jasonkester »

Smart move.

I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time.

... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera.

Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around.

They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it.

EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#55

Post by d_j_b »

gcp wrote: post #48
goldfeld wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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.

But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#56

Post by bdash »

bdash wrote: post #2

In an email to the WebKit development mailing list[1] Håkon Wium Lie, the Opera CTO, mentioned that they've had engineers working on WebKit for a while now, and they'll soon be contributing their work on multi-column layout to the WebKit project. [1]: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/...

And their first contribution is already attached to https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553!

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#57

Post by ed_blackburn »

Here's a scenario: As a network provider I wish to subsidise the hardware on my tariffs further still. I can shape traffic, sell advertising and analytic's to achieve this. Now if only I could get a capable proxy service compatible with the common browsers on iOS and Android.

Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser.

I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising down our throats cough cough Facebook and Google.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#58

Post by robocat »

szalansky wrote: post #13
grandpoobah wrote: post #7

Does this mean they'll be using V8 too?

I'm curious too! I think Javascript in Opera was a bigger problem than HTML. A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told that they can't make it work properly on Opera.

I have written a heavy JS proprietary Ajax app, and opera was very easy to get working.

Opera really follows the standards, and if I found any bugs they were often an indication of a fragile part of the code that needed fixing (Opera was very useful for finding dodgy areas of my code).

Of course it depends upon the features one is trying to use, not just the quality of the code :-)

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#59

Post by WiseWeasel »

panacea wrote: post #46
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.

Is that where babies come from?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#60

Post by gcp »

d_j_b wrote: post #55
gcp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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. But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic…

But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored.

No, it's totally the opposite. They only have to be "compatible" with this one implementation, and are free to rely on all implementation-specific bugs or implementation defined behavior when doing so.

Think IE box model around the IE5/6 age. Or hell, supporting Office Documents. Even if you'd have the source, being compatible certainly wouldn't have gotten much easier.

Note that WebKit is open source and Opera is having problems being bug-compatible with it.

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