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300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#2

Post by lucb1e »

Yes, website compatibility is one of the major issues of Opera. The second thing is lack of support in terms of add-ons and such, but I don't see how they can help that. This might just get more people to use Opera as their desktop browser though. Every time I test a website on Opera, I'm like "I should really give this browser a chance". But every time that I try it for an evening, I notice the shortcomings in support (by websites, add-ons, etc.).

Back then I was used to having fifteen add-ons in Firefox, but after Mozilla made one bad choice after another, I moved to Chrome and live by Adblock Plus and some own userscripts and bookmarklets now. Perhaps Opera isn't as much of a culture shock anymore to use, especially with the Webkit engine.

I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine. It has a smaller userbase I think, but does that automatically mean it wouldn't be the right choice? They don't say a word about this.

All in all, I do applaud the change. It's a hard step to take after you've been working on your own engine for years, but they've done it, and it will probably add a lot in terms of website support.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#4

Post by Arelius »

lucb1e wrote: post #2

Yes, website compatibility is one of the major issues of Opera. The second thing is lack of support in terms of add-ons and such, but I don't see how they can help that. This might just get more people to use Opera as their desktop browser though. Every time I test a website on Opera, I'm like "I should really give this browser a chance". But every time that I try it for an evening, I notice the shortcomings in suppo…

> I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine.

Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#5

Post by DeepDuh »

As someone who's been a longtime Opera user before switching to Chrome (buggy release around 10.x, weakening site compatibility) I'm so glad to read this. This decision shows the quality of engineers who work at Opera - not afraid to throw a huge chunk of code away if it doesn't serve the company anymore the way it was intended. Thinking about it I can't make up a single example of a large software house doing such a thing.

Looking forward to get my neat features again, such as fast forward, hotkey bindings, Opera turbo..

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#7

Post by DeepDuh »

lucb1e wrote: post #2

Yes, website compatibility is one of the major issues of Opera. The second thing is lack of support in terms of add-ons and such, but I don't see how they can help that. This might just get more people to use Opera as their desktop browser though. Every time I test a website on Opera, I'm like "I should really give this browser a chance". But every time that I try it for an evening, I notice the shortcomings in suppo…

I always liked them prioritizing to give you a complete out of the box features. Firefox's plugin hell made me crawl up the wall every time I saw the dreaded 'you must now restart Firefox' dialog. I assume it's better now but a few years ago Opera was so much ahead of FF in usability it wasn't even funny.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#9

Post by crazytony »

I guess this makes sense if you look at it from a phone/tablet manufacturers perspective: A manufacturer wouldn't necessarily have the desire to implement their own browser on top of webkit so they want a company (rules out Mozilla) that will support a web browser on their phone without also being a competitor.

The problem I think is that the non-aligned phone manufacturers are going the way of the dodo. You have Nokia committing to WM8, Apple on iOS with Safari and most others committing to Android. In theory a manufacturer could go Android + Opera but why license Opera when you can get Chrome for free?

That being said: Opera has always done a great job fighting against massive odds. I hope this move gives them the breathing room they need to keep going.

Re: 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

#10

Post by zobzu »

Arelius wrote: post #4
lucb1e wrote: post #2

Yes, website compatibility is one of the major issues of Opera. The second thing is lack of support in terms of add-ons and such, but I don't see how they can help that. This might just get more people to use Opera as their desktop browser though. Every time I test a website on Opera, I'm like "I should really give this browser a chance". But every time that I try it for an evening, I notice the shortcomings in suppo…

> I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine. Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo

I don't think it has to do with servo, which is really just a research project.

Gecko is a lot harder to embed (so yes, legacy is and issue here), and webkit is compatible with more sites (as sites are now often "designed for webkit" and use specific webkit-only extensions)

Makes the choice very easy and logical IMO. Not really good for the web, but maybe not a bad idea for Opera. Time will tell.

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