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Opera moves to WebKit

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#121

Post by gbrindisi »

cpeterso wrote: post #22
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 wonder if Opera is making an overture to get acquired by Google or Apple. Opera's innovative browser features have always been a bigger draw than the details of its Presto rendering engine.

If I'm not wrong Opera has already been acquired by Facebook.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#122

Post by gcp »

takluyver wrote: post #106
afhof wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...until differences in ideas about how a rendering engine /should/ work came up and webkit is forked.

That's not really a problem. Experimenting by forking the dominant rendering engine is much more convenient than experimenting by building your own rendering engine from scratch. If your fork has advantages, it's also easier for other people to use your work.

Experience suggests this works for small evolutions, but not more revolutionary changes.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#123

Post by gcp »

geon wrote: post #89
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.

> Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP. How can it be worth anything when the competition is free?

If it runs faster, with less memory, or is easier to port to new platforms that the other browsers have problems reaching.

Do you remember how long it took Google to port Chrome to Android? There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#125

Post by micheljansen »

nailer wrote: post #113
micheljansen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because when IE was the dominant browser that was totally the case. Don't forget that on mobile platforms, not including Windows Phone, WebKit is already the standard engine. Safari, Android's stock browser and Chrome all use WebKit and developing for mobile is a ghetto , especially because each version has their own quirks and bugs (and there are dozens of Android stock browser variations in active use at any g…

IE wasn't open source and wasn't maintained on any other platforms than Windows (the Mac and Solaris versions were woeful). WebKit can be maintained, forked etc as the world pleases.

Yes, but just because there is one engine, doesn't mean there is one standard. Just like during IE's monopoly there were several versions of the browser to deal with (each with their own quirks), an engine monoculture (Webkit or otherwise) does not guarantee ease of development at all.

I agree that if there is to be a rendering engine monoculture, it might as well be open source, but that in itself guarantees nothing.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#126

Post by nanidin »

gcp wrote: post #105
nanidin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing. Instead of having multiple vendors working on multiple competing products, they can now work on multiple competing features.

Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.

My line of thinking was that it takes X units of effort to implement feature Y. If two companies develop competing products, then 2X units of effort have been used to accomplish 1 feature Y.

If both of those companies are working on the same product, then it might follow that 2X units of effort would lead to the implementation of feature Y and feature Z. Or that feature Y is implemented in less time.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#127

Post by ricardobeat »

gcp wrote: post #118
ricardobeat wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly is bad for competition, but do we need competition in a market where pricing is irrelevant? It's better to have all vendors collaborating on a standard engine than multiple proprietary ones. What are the negatives?

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 css3 gradients or flexbox syntax changing completely after years prefixed in the wild.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#128

Post by tripzilch »

jasonkester wrote: post #95
rplnt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad. Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time? As mentioned in my first…

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), or you disagree that Opera aimed and successfully did implement web standards (which is provably false).

Saying "possibly" makes it sound like you don't really know. Did you consider, while typing that remark about the downvotes (bad form, and doesn't add anything to the discussion, except for polarizing it even more), that it might actually be caused by your self-admitted lack of knowledge on the subject?

Sure thing, those people may be "Opera devotees", because those are the people that know what they're talking about maybe?

You claim that top post was "not actually an anti-Opera comment". What about your remark that "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about"? That was you baiting all of those European and Russian Opera users, that you may or may not have noticed are also here on HN. If you had said "the browser nobody in the US actually cares about" then yes, I could not have disagreed. But this general claim is a tad ignorant, the global 1.3% market share is not at all geographically evenly spread, and goes up to 47% in certain countries. That's a long shot from saying nobody cares about it.

(BTW I may be an Opera devotee--a little bit less than I was a few years ago though--but I'm not downvoting you)

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#129

Post by jgraham »

jasonkester wrote: post #95
rplnt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad. Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time? As mentioned in my first…

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 involved in the standards process; both in codifying the legacy and in more forward-looking initiatives to add novel functionality to the platform. For example Hixie was working at Opera when he started work on what became HTML5. Opera's Simon Pieters wrote a spec for CSS quirks mode [2]. We have also been involved in numerous other specs, and in the beginnings of the effort to produce a comprehensive vendor-neutral testsuite for web platform technologies.

[1] http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/... [2] http://quirks.spec.whatwg.org/

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#130

Post by toyg »

gbrindisi wrote: post #121
cpeterso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Opera is making an overture to get acquired by Google or Apple. Opera's innovative browser features have always been a bigger draw than the details of its Presto rendering engine.

If I'm not wrong Opera has already been acquired by Facebook.

No. There were rumours, and maybe something more than that (I know somebody whose hiring fell through because Opera went into the typical pre-acquisition "lockout mode", about a year ago), but in the end nothing happened.
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