141–150 of 295 posts
At last. Opera used to be my favorite browser, thanks to their sophisticated UI. But I gave it up when HTML5 started coming in. I believe it had problems with Javascripts too. Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users using it and being happy.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/
back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.
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 don't think it's a loss, I wouldn't mind if every browser switched to Webkit. Problems with cross-browser rendering differences would be gone, all browsers would use the same newest technologies and the engine would evolve much faster.
It's not as if the browser vendors simply do a 'git pull && make' every couple of weeks.
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> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?
As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe : Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%) Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%) Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I…
Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…
EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com:
parseInt('06'); // 6
parseInt('08'); // 0
Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.
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…
Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define st…
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.
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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 cs…
Real innovation is far more drastic and disruptive. When it comes along, it often meets heavy resistance from those who are entrenched, especially when these people may not benefit from it. This is true even within open source projects. Unorthodox ideas will often be brutally crushed, even if the benefits they provide are immense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?
As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe : Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%) Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%) Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I…
I think by far the biggest impact was bundling Chrome and autoinstalling it with Java and Flash updates. Google must have paid top dollar for it which Firefox and Opera had no chance of matching.
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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.
It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question.
The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.
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.
It definitely feels like the winds of change.
EDIT: Found the article: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/02/12/opera-founder-sells-....