Live data from Hacker News

Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

101–110 of 295 posts

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#101
I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a far superior job in regards to standards.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#102
post #80
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. 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".

Some species DO get extinguished.

Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine

Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

This is stopping evolution, not helping it.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#103
post #99
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

20% in the UK would surprise me too, but that graph shows Opera at 0.56%, and seemingly declining.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#104
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It breaks my heart to know that Presto is going to most likely be left to bitrot in some SCM somewhere. But on the same note, I understand that using webkit will be better for Opera as a browser.

I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.

that is probably the case. Do a

opera:about

and look at the list of Third Party Software...

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#105
post #85
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing

How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#106
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not really a problem. Experimenting by forking the dominant rendering engine is much more convenient than experimenting by building your own rendering engine from scratch. If your fork has advantages, it's also easier for other people to use your work.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#108

This is how it works - open source quality created by enthusiastic community wins proprietary crap produced by wage coders counting hours and lines of code. This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.

Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#109
post #5

And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

I'd like to see some serious work done on Dillo ( http://www.dillo.org/ ), which is much faster than chrome on low-end boxes and could be really good for developing countries.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#110

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…

  > Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and
  > webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still
  > people use their engine.
Well, I've tried and it is still better than few buggy engines. I am sure Gecko and Presto also have bugs that nobody cares about.
Post reply on HN