71–80 of 295 posts
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-b...
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-ne...
(those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother linking)
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.
Don't forget that on mobile platforms, not including Windows Phone, WebKit is already the standard engine. Safari, Android's stock browser and Chrome all use WebKit and developing for mobile is a ghetto, especially because each version has their own quirks and bugs (and there are dozens of Android stock browser variations in active use at any given time).
This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.
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> 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 so…
Although there is a chance here for the -prefix-rabbit-hole to yawn wide, there's also an opportunity for a (nearly-)universally-supported rendering engine to emerge that could, one day, get into bed with the standards committee. Surely this would be a good endgame for the browser wars?
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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.
They mostly do. Dozens and dozens and features. But it works other way around as well, and it's a great thing in the end. The most beneficial features are virtually on every browser.
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I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.
Considering they are switching to an open source rendering engine, I think there is likelihood they would have open-sourced presto already if that was possible. I suspect that like much proprietary software, there are too many licensed dependencies. It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone wou…
So if there was no legal constraint, Presto could see day of light. If nothing else, then in patches to webkit :)
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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.
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…
This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.
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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.
Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished.
This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough.
If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team).
Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".