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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

261–270 of 295 posts

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being unhappy isn't likely to change Opera's decision, of course, but... the reaction to Opera's decision is likely to influence other players.

For example, the difference between "bring on the monoculture" and "this is a sad day for web standards" is likely to influence Mozilla's future direction, both directly and indirectly (via the choices web developers make in supporting or not supporting Firefox).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#262

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.

If it's one browser that have a shit ton of per domain/site options it is Opera.

edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#264
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN…

I run a site that is not technical at all, it's a legal site related to divorcing fathers. Last year the site had 1,111,795 total visits and 5429 of them were from Opera. So I'm not sure who is this community that cares that much about Opera but they are not in the US.

What is the site? Interesting.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#265

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…

All browsers support document.all; see [1]. It is true that Opera tried to reverse engineer more of the IE DOM than most others, for example we were the only ones to have attachEvent and friends. But in recent years that caused problems with sites that made false equivalences like "has attachEvent -> must be IE" and so non-standard features were being actively removed. It is also true that Opera has been heavily invo…

Yea, it is unfortunate that Netscape "Mariner", which was also going to support DOM level 1, got cancelled.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#266
I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best engines out there, period.

That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's not quite apparent at all, and no, a few Google searches did not yield any useful information. (I do however like the high horse you're on, very nice breed indeed.)

I call on your "no need to rehash it here." Without even one good example, I'd say you're just trying to be elitist.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#268
post #70

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…

"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN…

You say 300 million like it is actually a big number in this context. Its not, use a percentage.

I'd also love to know where 300 million is coming from, as it seems extremely high.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#269

I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best engines out there, period. That's n…

WebKit is not a "browser engine".
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