Opera moves to WebKit • Hacker News Board

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#251

Post by Dylanlacey » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #146

panacea wrote: 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.

The current monoculture is much worse. It's a monoculture where the developers are not supporting the popular thing because it's popular, but also because it's what they themselves prefer. This is much more dangerous and it spills over to other areas. If you walked into a coffee shop in San Francisco you'd be hard pressed to see anything other than macbooks, iphones, and chrome (maybe safari a little bit). So forget…

Nothing is as condescending to your customers as a smug "Sorry, we don't like your browser, go get a real renderer, then we'll talk" where 'real' is defined as "What I like to use".

And you're right, there seems to be a strong tendency towards mutual masturbation over the web. "Make what I want" is leading to this tiny little house of mirrors.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#252

Post by Dylanlacey » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 10:50 PM UTC

We already had a monoculture; Opera not using Webkit wasn't preventing this because as you can see in the comments in this page, most non-Opera users considered its existence silly and never catered for it.

I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996). But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got tired of it.

And I think they are tired. They're talking about finally impacting the future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing them to do that.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#253

Post by sjwright » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 10:57 PM UTC

michael_h wrote: post #159

meaty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've upvoted you because it's the same from us. We have had zero hits from opera for a couple of years.

I'm not sure that you would know. This is my user agent string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) ...running the current version of Opera. Most other people I know that use opera do the same thing to get around silly sites that won't even try to display their content.

It's moves like that which mean Opera has dug its own grave of irrelevancy. They should have given you the tools to enable spoofing on a per-domain basis only, not browser-wide.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#254

Post by nemetroid » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 11:13 PM UTC

user24 wrote: post #221

papsosouid wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about parsing in base 10, we're talking about parsing in base 8. I need to be able to tell if the parse succeeded or not, silently hiding errors is bad. The correct behaviour demonstrated in perl and python: $ perl -le 'print 07' 7 $ perl -le 'print 08' Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors. $ python -c 'print 07' 7 $ python -c 'print…

Got to admit, I am disappointed that > parseInt("08", 8); returns 0 instead of NaN

Returning 0 makes perfect sense. parseInt matches an integer from the beginning of the string, so it reads the 0 and then stops at the 8 because 8 is not a valid digit in base 8.

    >>> parseInt("123foobar", 10)
    123

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#255

Post by PommeDeTerre » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 11:23 PM UTC

mikaelj wrote: post #242

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A lot. The problems should be quite apparent to any developer who has used any mainstream programming languages aside from JavaScript and PHP. But for those who don't have such experience, a few quick Google searches should turn up more than enough information indicating the problems with JavaScript. There's no need to rehash it here.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#256

Post by nevster » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 11:29 PM UTC

Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number?

Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#257

Post by mbitca » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 11:32 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #253

michael_h wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that you would know. This is my user agent string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) ...running the current version of Opera. Most other people I know that use opera do the same thing to get around silly sites that won't even try to display their content.

It's moves like that which mean Opera has dug its own grave of irrelevancy. They should have given you the tools to enable spoofing on a per-domain basis only, not browser-wide.

They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#258

Post by onethree » Thu, Feb 14, 2013, 12:20 AM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #156

As someone who has used Opera for over ten years - probably 15 - and still does, Opera has become an awful browser over the last year or so. Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser with native tab stacking. It also used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active tabs (hell, the onl…

~8 years for me - definitely agree about the sluggishness, but i can't say i've noticed any problems with the sync feature.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#259

Post by kbrosnan » Thu, Feb 14, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

khuey wrote: post #170

gcp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You two should hug this out in #mobile.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#260

Post by mtgx » Thu, Feb 14, 2013, 12:54 AM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #230

gcp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> Mozilla has significantly less employees than Opera Hu, really? Would have thought the opposite as Mozilla gets 100 million dollars a year from Google.

Mozilla should be asking more from Google. A lot more. Apple is charging them $1 billion per year, and they only have 50% more users than Mozilla.