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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#171

Post by rospaya »

astrojoy wrote: post #134

Question: Where are the HN moderators? They are quick to hellban users but allow Opera to get the top 3 positions on HN's front page? Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission-critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways. This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser withou…

I agree.

We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what mods are for.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#172

Post by bpatrianakos »

nolok wrote: post #158
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 are not being downvoted because of Opera devotees. You are getting downvoted because of your passive aggressive tone, similar to every single reddit comment which starts with "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this", nobody like the martyr argument. And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will te…

That's all in the interpretation. I saw nothing passive aggressive about what he said. He just stated his opinions (and what I believe to be many facts too) in a very mater-of-fact way. There's a difference between that and passive aggressive.

As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concerned and preoccupied with complete and totally accuracy (like we often are on HN and miss the forest for the trees because of) Opera really isn't much to worry about. It's a great browser and all but you can bet that if you're building a new web property you're not going to see a lot of Opera users with 1.6% market share worldwide. Sure, you might get lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) and somehow get a swarm of Opera users but I also might win the lottery this week too.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#173

Post by rurounijones »

Is there any talk of open-sourcing the presto engine?

Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of how it was done" archiving.

It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary obscurity

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#175

Post by blablabla123 »

tripzilch wrote: post #128
jasonkester wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

What do you mean, "possibly"? Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time (which is implemented by copying certain quirks--and O isn't the only one that does that--as well as having a large database of popular sites that are fixed with bits of custom JS)…

>Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time

Noble aim but that doesn't work in the consumer world. I am pretty open-minded, so I am seriously trying to use Opera every 2 or 3 years. And each time I really start to enjoy using it but after one or two days I get horribly disappointed: a significant number of websites I like just doesn't work. Not just loss in function, they are completely unusuable, for instance I get a white page.

Last time I did this try is probably 2 years ago. Last time I observed this behaviour with another non-IE-browser: at least 5 years ago, probably more like 8.

There was a time when certain websites only worked with IE. Somehow Mozilla and friends adapted... but what happened to Opera? I cannot stop thinking that Opera somehow got stuck in the 90s. They are certainly innovative, they were the CSS pioneers, everybody copied tabs and other cool features.

But still... When your rendering is incompatible to the real world, nobody will use you. So I can only agree: smart move. Maybe this will make Opera a serious competitor in the Browser market again.

Anyway, I also agree, Opera still has a user base. I work on an in-house tool and we have users using Opera, so I test against it.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#176

Post by bzbarsky »

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.

Doing this would mean being forever stuck in single-threaded land for rendering (e.g. nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could ever happen).

People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact.

So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores, by all means try to get them to all switch to WebKit.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#177

Post by DanBC »

This thread feels like people didn't learn from all the best viewed in netscape or best viewed in IE terrible sites from early 2000s.

[BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#178

Post by bzbarsky »

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.

The problem with evolution is that it's slow and can never reach parts of the problem space that require too large a leap.

In the case of web rendering engines, for example, I don't see "evolution" getting us to a rendering engine that can usefully parallelize over, say, 64 cores starting from the engines we have right now. And monoculture would ensure that we never get there.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#179

Post by bzbarsky »

coldtea wrote: post #80
gcp wrote: 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".

The point is that a WebKit monoculture would make the Servo project impossible.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#180

Post by bzbarsky »

ricardobeat wrote: post #127
gcp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need competition for technical evolution. Pricing has nothing to do with this. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a WebKit monoculture will stifle technical innovation in web rendering engines, because they'll be constrained with being (bug-)compatible with WebKit.

Why? how is competition better than collaboration? webkit routinely gets breaking changes, it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features. Wouldn't having a load of developers in different environments, working on the same codebase actually accelerate innovation? Something could go from W3C/WHATWG draft to implementation in a matter of weeks, then we wouldn't have things like cs…

> it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features.

Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns.

> accelerate innovation?

Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing.

Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base, for example.

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