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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's not that easy. It's one thing to add a missing feature to a Ruby gem or event to jQuery, but WebKit is a much bigger beast. Most geeks can't realistically patch things in a big heap of C++ code like that...

The codebase is pretty big... and I think you're right that someone can pop in and contribute to smaller projects much more easily. But I've poked around in it and it's not that bad. If you put a week into understanding it, it's not nearly as daunting.

It's about the same as when you start at a company with a large existing codebase. You're not going to get much done until you've read and understand the chunks of the code that relate to what you need to do. This spinup time is definitely bigger than the hour it can take to fix a bug in a small project that you previously had no experience with, but it's definitely within the realm of the possible.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#92
post #82

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…

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#93
post #86
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems you are right, other comments mentioned using V8 as well.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#94
post #48

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…

It's even worse. You're letting the standard be defined by a specific version of an implementation. It would impede progress for future versions of the same implementation.

For example today I just browsed my Internet provider's customer area. Their online invoicing page only works on Firefox and IE7, but not IE8, IE9, Opera and Chrome. Urgh.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#95
post #82

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…

Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Possibly. But they're also the only browser I'm aware of apart from IE that supports "document.all". And (at least as of 2007), they were still using IE's quirks mode box model if you didn't specify a doctype.

As I said, they did a good job of trying to please everybody. You could code for Firefox or IE and have a reasonable expectation that it would work on Opera too.

That's a good thing, by the way.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#96
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#97
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

[deleted]

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#99
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301

And Britain at 20% (was surprized myself!) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201208-201301

Edit: my bad, the graph probably didn't refresh properly

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#100
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.

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