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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#81

Post by pkorzeniewski »

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 don't think it's a loss, I wouldn't mind if every browser switched to Webkit. Problems with cross-browser rendering differences would be gone, all browsers would use the same newest technologies and the engine would evolve much faster.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#82

Post by rplnt »

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…

You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time?

As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor).

ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#83

Post by ctz »

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.

Please explain how I can patch webkit bugs on my iPhone.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#84

Post by hkolk »

ohwp wrote: post #70
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…

Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#85

Post by nanidin »

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.

Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing. Instead of having multiple vendors working on multiple competing products, they can now work on multiple competing features.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#86

Post by bdash »

rplnt wrote: post #82
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…

You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad. Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time? As mentioned in my first…

> Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either.

The Chromium Embedded Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) isn't too far from that. I'm not sure if Opera is using this project in particular, but they do mention using Chromium.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#87

Post by rplnt »

szalansky wrote: post #30
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.

Its ability to configure basically anything from user interface is far above any other browser. Chrome is a browser that I recommend to parents. It has dumbed down interface, zero options - perfect for average majority. It is still powerful when combined with dozens of extensions, but it still can't compete with Opera in this area.

It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#88

Post by afhof »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #81
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 don't think it's a loss, I wouldn't mind if every browser switched to Webkit. Problems with cross-browser rendering differences would be gone, all browsers would use the same newest technologies and the engine would evolve much faster.

...until differences in ideas about how a rendering engine /should/ work came up and webkit is forked.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#89

Post by geon »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #62
cpeterso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP.

How can it be worth anything when the competition is free?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#90

Post by kibwen »

d_j_b wrote: post #74
gcp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed - in principle. But that was back when MS handed down IE binaries from the mountaintop whenever it wanted and most people ran different proprietary OSes. WebKit is open source and it runs on every major platform. 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…

The only worry here, as always, is that an implementation will come to define the standard rather than the other way around.

Note that coding to an implementation rather than a standard does stifle innovation, because when you code to target the implementation you inevitably rely on bugs in the implementation, without ever knowing or trying to. From the perspective of an implementor, would you fix a bug even if it meant breaking an unknowably large number of websites? If not, you've adopted that bug for the rest of time, and every subsequent implementation, ever, will be forced to implement the bug as well when they could be busy implementing new features. Now compound this by thousands of bugs, and reflect on all the time spent implementing Quirks Mode in every browser engine that exists today.

I do agree with you that in a perfect world we wouldn't need multiple implementations, because bugs would not exist and the lone implementation would track the standard perfectly, and because the standard would be controlled by neutral third-parties. But I think it's much too soon to declare the current era the browser endgame.

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