Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 295 posts

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#151

Post by PommeDeTerre »

d_j_b wrote: post #55
gcp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of having the standard defined by an implementation is that it makes it almost impossible to have another implementation. This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need. That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to ge…

> That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now. But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic…

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 a more sensible scripting language like Lua or Python would increase the robustness of the web, while standardizing it further only entrenches the problem deeper.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#152

Post by lttlrck »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #142
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how it works in reality. IndexedDB has been in WebKit for a couple of years now but Safari still doesn't have it. It's not as if the browser vendors simply do a 'git pull && make' every couple of weeks.

IndexedDb is a proposal and it doesn't affect rendering.

But your point is taken.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#153

Post by PommeDeTerre »

meerita wrote: post #119
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 was dominant on one OS. It wasn't dominante on anything else than Windows world. Please, and that dominion lasted no more than 10 years. It ended with Android and iOS.

Windows was (and still is) the dominant desktop OS. Until recently, it was a very dominant dominance, with competitors usually making up less than 5% of the market share.

Even today, mobile users typically account for only about 10% to 15% of a site's traffic, for sites that don't directly target mobile users. Mobile just isn't as important or widespread as a lot of people think it is.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#154

Post by [deleted] »

nanidin wrote: post #126
gcp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#156

Post by kmfrk »

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 only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome).

There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am not in a rush to switch.

Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts, and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still huge.

Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now.

I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it for for over a decade.

And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#157

Post by coldtea »

gcp wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished. This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team). Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".

Some species DO get extinguished. Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whate…

>Some species DO get extinguished.

>>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future".

>Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact.

Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".

>A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#158

Post by nolok »

jasonkester wrote: post #53

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…

You are not being downvoted because of Opera devotees. You are getting downvoted because of your passive aggressive tone, similar to every single reddit comment which starts with "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this", nobody like the martyr argument.

And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will tell you another story for Opera, not supporting Opera there "because it only has 1.6% worldwide" would be a dumb reasoning. What matters for your choice is the market share on your properties, not on others' properties.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#159

Post by michael_h »

meaty wrote: post #78
jasonkester wrote: post #53

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'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.
Post reply on HN