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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#61

Post by gcp »

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.

It can be forked and evolution can continue.

Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#62

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

cpeterso wrote: post #22
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.

I seriously doubt it.

What IP or userbase does Opera have that either Google or Apple would want? If either of the two of them wanted to copy Opera's browser features they would just go ahead and do so.

If anything this makes Opera less interesting as a potential purchase. Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#63

Post by lazyjones »

That's going to make them less competitive in my opinion, although it's an understandable move considering their size. I am wondering about the timing though - now that HTML5 is finally a standard and browser developers can stabilize their rendering instead of playing catch-up with the latest draft features, it's a bit late to switch. They would have benefited more by switching 2-3 years ago.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#64

Post by marcedwards »

drinchev wrote: post #47
flyinRyan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#65

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

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.

I would argue that competition is healthy.

So the question is is a fork "true" competition or more of a "suggestion" for a feature change?

Or to put it another way, instead of evolution happening (as in the best win and the worst die) we now have a situation where the winners and losers are decided by subjective individuals (i.e. some project manager somewhere decides to import a forked branch back into their main branch).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#66

Post by quadhome »

marcedwards wrote: post #64
drinchev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.

That doesn't mean those patches will be accepted upstream.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#67

Post by micheljansen »

Wow, that's a huge step. Being the #4 rendering engine was really hurting Opera though. Most people use WebKit or Gecko during development and then make it work in IE as well, but never get to Opera. One of the main reasons I stopped using Opera for browsing was that, despite having some great features (always loved their gestures), so many sites just didn't work properly.

I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as they have always done.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#68

Post by kibwen »

marcedwards wrote: post #64
drinchev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.

  > WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build 
  > their own version with any fixes or changes they like.
You're committing an error here. Say you find a bug in Webkit. You patch it, but Apple declines to accept it upstream. You fork the project. Now how do you get your fork into the hands of your users? Unless you're secretly Google in disguise, you're SOL.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#69

Post by gcp »

marcedwards wrote: post #64
drinchev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them.

So now you have a fixed WebKit that nobody else uses.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#70

Post by ohwp »

jasonkester wrote: post #53

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…

"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore."

Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets.

"They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about."

This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.

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