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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#162

Post by brownell »

jerhewet wrote: post #144
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…

Unhealthy? I've been longing for the day that all browsers are based on WebKit, because it means a real web programming language will be that much closer to replacing kiddiescript. EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com : parseInt('06'); // 6 parseInt('08'); // 0 Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.

I think you're missing something...

parseInt('08', 10); // 8

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#164

Post by furyofantares »

rimantas wrote: post #112

To all who want to compare webkit being dominant with IE: don't. IE was closed source, and most important of all: it was not developed for a long time after IE6. WebKit development is very active, there are several companies involved and there is still a lot of work they are willing to do in bringing it forward.

Yeah, as I remember IE6 was actually a pretty good browser when it came out. I believe the real problem was it didn't get updated often enough, and even when it did get updated you couldn't count on users to take the updates, so we got stuck with it for years when everything else was making progress. WebKit gets updated all the time and at least on the desktop you can count on users to get updates to their browsers pretty quickly.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#165

Post by gcp »

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…

Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company.

That's true, but those companies also make much more products. Mozilla has significantly less employees than Opera.

What gives Google, Apple and Microsoft power is that they also own the platforms. (And now you'll understand why Firefox OS is a thing)

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#167

Post by michael_h »

jerhewet wrote: post #144
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…

Unhealthy? I've been longing for the day that all browsers are based on WebKit, because it means a real web programming language will be that much closer to replacing kiddiescript. EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com : parseInt('06'); // 6 parseInt('08'); // 0 Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.

This comes up every now and then. That code makes perfect sense. You write octal numbers by prefixing them with a zero, the same way you write hexadecimal numbers by prefixing them with a '0x'.

  strtol("06", NULL, 8);  //6
  strtol("08", NULL, 8);  //0
Is C bad? Should Kernighan and Ritchie feel bad?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#168

Post by gcp »

estel wrote: post #132
gcp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it runs faster, with less memory, or is easier to port to new platforms that the other browsers have problems reaching. Do you remember how long it took Google to port Chrome to Android? There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.

But that wasn't a problem with Chrome's rendering engine: there were plenty of WebKit browsers on Android from the start (including Browser).

Yes, but they were all using the platform version, which was older. Porting the new features took time.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#169

Post by jarek-foksa »

yread wrote: post #104
fpgeek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I can see almost exclusively Open Source libraries there, they are listing them because this what MIT/GPL/MPL licenses require.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#170

Post by khuey »

gcp wrote: post #49
kibwen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.

Firefox for Android no longer does this, and hasn't since the "Native Fennec" launch.
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