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300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#21

Post by masklinn »

zobzu wrote: post #10
Arelius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine. Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo

I don't think it has to do with servo, which is really just a research project. Gecko is a lot harder to embed (so yes, legacy is and issue here), and webkit is compatible with more sites (as sites are now often "designed for webkit" and use specific webkit-only extensions) Makes the choice very easy and logical IMO. Not really good for the web, but maybe not a bad idea for Opera. Time will tell.

> Gecko is a lot harder to embed (so yes, legacy is and issue here)

Gecko embedding is also unsupported since May 2011: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#22

Post by andreastt »

gkoberger wrote: post #12

Interesting. Opera makes most of their revenue through licensing their rendering engine. That's how they've turned their ~2% marketshare into $180MM in revenue (compared to, say, Mozilla's ~26% and $300MM). I wonder how this will affect that. [EDIT: I mixed up currencies; fixed it.]

A lot of the work that goes into adapting a browser for various chipsets and devices (TVs, STBs, etc.) is highly configuration dependent: Almost no device is the same. There is still a market for customizing and making device specific browsers even after Presto.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#23

Post by rodion_89 »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #18

The web may not be fully open, but it is far more open than the closed world of "apps". (Of topic, perhaps...) I hear this a lot, and I think, for the most part, web applications aren't remotely open (in general). While I can use any computer to connect to a web site, very few sites actually allow me to get my data out of them. In short, in my opinion, open access to data trumps open access by various clients. On the…

You still have "to pray the developers left" you a method to get the data in either case as native apps are simply the client-side of an application (just like a web apps).

The "openness" of the web is mostly referring to the technology stack (open source rendering engines), the standards, and the freedom of distribution. All of those points are not fully "open" and that's what I think they're referring to when they say that "the web may not be fully open".

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#25

Post by gebe »

DeepDuh wrote: post #5

As someone who's been a longtime Opera user before switching to Chrome (buggy release around 10.x, weakening site compatibility) I'm so glad to read this. This decision shows the quality of engineers who work at Opera - not afraid to throw a huge chunk of code away if it doesn't serve the company anymore the way it was intended. Thinking about it I can't make up a single example of a large software house doing such a…

Same experience, left Opera for Chrome for exactly the same reasons. However I miss much of the features in my daily use, the ones you listed and many more. Especially Opera's tab preview that doesn't seem to have an equivalent in Chrome is something I have found myself missing deeply. I really hope Opera becomes a viable alternative for me again now.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#27

Post by franciscoap »

DeepDuh wrote: post #5

As someone who's been a longtime Opera user before switching to Chrome (buggy release around 10.x, weakening site compatibility) I'm so glad to read this. This decision shows the quality of engineers who work at Opera - not afraid to throw a huge chunk of code away if it doesn't serve the company anymore the way it was intended. Thinking about it I can't make up a single example of a large software house doing such a…

Back in the day, Netscape did a full rewrite between major versions. There's a Spolsky blog post about it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Very interesting read.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#29

Post by LeonidasXIV »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #19
zobzu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Mozilla will ever switch. The reason why they've their own engine and try to keep a decent marketshare (which they do indeed have), is to be able to have a say on web standards, and the web in general. Having a say ensure there isn't a single voice taking decisions that led us to things like IE6. And we're actually starting to see IE6-ish stuff happening with webkit, as it's nearly the only rendering en…

I would think one vendor would be great for standards: it is the standard. It sucks for any kind of innovation, though, as IE6 shows incredibly well. Out if curiosity, what IE6-ish things do you see WebKit doing?

> I would think one vendor would be great for standards: it is the standard.

Well, IE6 was the standard. See how many sites were "optimized" for IE6 and getting them to render in a browser that supported these pesky underdog W3C standards was bound to fail.

> Out if curiosity, what IE6-ish things do you see WebKit doing?

Not quite the same, but the -webkit CSS prefix that people use without a fallback for other browsers: webkit browsers display the stuff and on e.g. Firefox or Opera it looks broken, because nobody cares to add a -moz or -o prefixed version, or even the non-prefixed version.

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