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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#241

Post by adamsmith »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #115

Opera value preposition was in that they provided a complete solution (rendering engine, network stack, filesystem integration, security, customizable UI, etc.) People and companies often picked up WebKit for their hardware platform without realizing how much stuff is there besides the renderer itself. As a result, they had to spend more time on porting the rest of the stack and were late to market. That's, for examp…

This is a really cool comment. Is there anywhere I can read more about the UI innovations Chrome took from Opera (or web browser UI innovations in general)?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#242

Post by mikaelj »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #151
d_j_b wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 get better now. But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic…

Robustness does not come from more rigid standards. For instance, it doesn't matter how standardized JavaScript is, it will still be a bad language in so many ways. If anything, standardization locks in the bad feature set, making is far harder to remove or fix. Robustness often comes from the opposite approach. It's the willingness to throw out ideas and code that are observed to be broken. Replacing JavaScript with…

Uhm. What's wrong with ISO/IEC 16262 ECMAScript?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#243

Post by bzbarsky »

mikaelj wrote: post #237
bzbarsky wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you implying Presto is multi-threaded?

No (though it will in fact do layout in parallel with JS execution by time-slicing its JS, last I checked, unlike other UAs).

My point is that it's bad if all browsers switch to WebKit and web sites absolutely require WebKit to work correctly, which is what the parent of my comment was suggesting should happen. This point is somewhat independent of what happens with Presto per se.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#244

Post by freshhawk »

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…

Amazing how communities that railed against monolithic implementations and stagnation in the past are perfectly happy with it when it's "their team" that's becoming the monolith.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#245

Post by kolistivra »

aclimatt wrote: post #216
tarabukka wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not passive aggressive? >the browser that nobody cares about >Now they see Chrome is going to win Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day…

No, they're literally copying Chromium. They're forking the source tree and including it as the rendering engine in their browser. That is a verbatim copy. There's nothing wrong with that, and I think it's a smart move and does not speak anything less of Opera (in fact it speaks probably a lot more), but it is a copy. Before, Opera "copied" Trident by implementing the same quirks so pages behaved the same way. They w…

Most of the features of modern browsers, which we take for granted, are actually inventions of Opera: http://www.opera.com/portal/15/years/

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#246

Post by mikaelj »

dgesang wrote: post #219
crazygringo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions, not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group hold contradictory opinions. But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for exploring, prototyping, experimenting , where a…

While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for That's one problem: many web developers program for browsers , not standards . In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone agrees/complies to one…

You seriously underestimate the development time it takes to pull off such a thing.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#247

Post by Dylanlacey »

freshhawk wrote: post #244
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…

Amazing how communities that railed against monolithic implementations and stagnation in the past are perfectly happy with it when it's "their team" that's becoming the monolith.

I'm not perfectly happy, there's not not much impact being unhappy is likely to have. Once a company makes a huge announcement like this, displeasure from the customer base is unlikely to cause them to change their minds until either they discover the change was a HUGE mistake and upsets lots of their customers and they lose significant market share OR they're forced to change because they go bankrupt.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#248

Post by Dylanlacey »

rplnt wrote: post #75
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt it. What IP or userbase does Opera have that either Google or Apple would want? If either of the two of them wanted to copy Opera's browser features they would just go ahead and do so. If anything this makes Opera less interesting as a potential purchase. Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP.

> If either of the two of them wanted to copy Opera's browser features they would just go ahead and do so. They mostly do. Dozens and dozens and features. But it works other way around as well, and it's a great thing in the end. The most beneficial features are virtually on every browser.

As an aside, feature copying was one of the greatest sources of irritation my friends had when Opera was still this really weird, unique thing that I used and they didn't. It was quite regular to have them excitedly tell me to switch to Firefox because "Dude, there's tabbed browsing, it's SO great!" Uh, thanks, I've... I've had that for years. But I'm glad you're discovering it too!

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#249

Post by mikaelj »

runn1ng wrote: post #225

I see this as a win for open source software. (Or "free software". I never know.) Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could come, fork it and make it better. Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.

Apple shared?

Get with the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#250

Post by zanny »

rplnt wrote: post #76
Arelius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering they are switching to an open source rendering engine, I think there is likelihood they would have open-sourced presto already if that was possible. I suspect that like much proprietary software, there are too many licensed dependencies. It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone wou…

Opera's response to Open-Sourcing always was, that they would have no business that way. Apple doesn't care I believe, Google/Microsoft are in it for search and ads, Firefox isn't a business (and they make all money from search I think). While Opera makes a lot of money from search, they have a lot of OEM deals that they are afraid to lose. So if there was no legal constraint, Presto could see day of light. If nothin…

Mozilla is absolutely a business, they are just non-profit.
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