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Opera moves to WebKit

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#201

Post by crazygringo »

dgesang wrote: post #186

After reading some comments here I come to the conclusion that (too) many web developers are just a bunch of opportunistic ignorant hypocrites. On the one hand they repeatedly state that constantly expanding variety of HTML9 technologies[1] is THE best thing that could have ever happen to the Internet and that there is nothing worse than mono culture . On the other hand they do not seem to be willing to even consider…

Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions, not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group hold contradictory opinions.

But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for exploring, prototyping, experimenting, where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for, because of resource constraints.

In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice, but you can see how they're just different perspectives.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#202

Post by bzbarsky »

ricardobeat wrote: post #195
bzbarsky wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features. Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns. > accelerate innovation? Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing. Please explain to me…

> Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base I don't know enough about the webkit architecture to say anything, but I guess it wouldn't be any faster if it started with Presto.

While likely true, the value of multiple UAs as opposed to a monoculture is that it increases the likelihood that a revolutionary implementation that _can_ scare well to large number of cores would be able to get any traction at all instead of just being stillborn because it doesn't duplicate all the bugs of the monoculture.

So my point wasn't that one would build such a UA by starting with Presto. My point was that there are distinct advantages to competition over everyone using the same rendering engine.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#203

Post by T-hawk »

michael_h wrote: post #167
jerhewet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unhealthy? I've been longing for the day that all browsers are based on WebKit, because it means a real web programming language will be that much closer to replacing kiddiescript. EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com : parseInt('06'); // 6 parseInt('08'); // 0 Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.

This comes up every now and then. That code makes perfect sense . You write octal numbers by prefixing them with a zero, the same way you write hexadecimal numbers by prefixing them with a '0x'. strtol("06", NULL, 8); //6 strtol("08", NULL, 8); //0 Is C bad? Should Kernighan and Ritchie feel bad?

C wasn't bad for making that design decision in 1973, to include syntactical space for octal numbers. Programmers actually used octal notation then. It made sense in an environment where contemporary tech included the PDP-8's 12-bit words (four octal glyphs) and displays of seven-segment numeric readouts (where octal is useful, as letters for hexadecimal can't be displayed and base-10 needs conversion logic.)

Javascript was bad for making that design decision in 1995, when nobody seriously used octal for anything, so the leading zero was vastly more likely to introduce a class of WTF bugs instead.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#205

Post by ok_craig »

tarabukka wrote: post #200
bpatrianakos wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all in the interpretation. I saw nothing passive aggressive about what he said. He just stated his opinions (and what I believe to be many facts too) in a very mater-of-fact way. There's a difference between that and passive aggressive. As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concern…

Not passive aggressive? >the browser that nobody cares about >Now they see Chrome is going to win Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day…

> Implies that...

It doesn't actually imply any of that.

No one's saying Opera hasn't innovated. Only that it's not very popular and that, in addition to their innovations, they follow trends. That's not a passive aggressive statement.

> They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

The commenter was suggesting that Opera is now choosing to be "standards compliant" because the current most popular browsers are, as opposed to Opera's choice in the past to be non-standards compliant to copy the top browser of that time, IE. If the top browser is standards compliant, and you want to copy it, what would your browser end up being?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#206

Post by jlarocco »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #81
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 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.

How would that be any different than when IE had 90+% of the user base?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#207

Post by papsosouid »

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 don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore

You don't know very good web devs then. By far the easiest path as a developer is to develop for opera, then test the rest. You end up with far few problems that way. If you develop for firefox or chrome it is easy to write a bunch of stuff that works in that browser, but not in the other, and then you have way more work dealing with fixing it. Opera is strict enough that if it works there, it is almost certainly going to work everywhere else (not old IEs obviously).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#208

Post by papsosouid »

michael_h wrote: post #167
jerhewet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unhealthy? I've been longing for the day that all browsers are based on WebKit, because it means a real web programming language will be that much closer to replacing kiddiescript. EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com : parseInt('06'); // 6 parseInt('08'); // 0 Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.

This comes up every now and then. That code makes perfect sense . You write octal numbers by prefixing them with a zero, the same way you write hexadecimal numbers by prefixing them with a '0x'. strtol("06", NULL, 8); //6 strtol("08", NULL, 8); //0 Is C bad? Should Kernighan and Ritchie feel bad?

No, because strtol gives you the ability to see that the parse failed and where. You chose to give it NULL there, but you could choose to use the function correctly. You can't do it correctly in the javascript and PHP cases. In the PHP case, it is actually just a bug in the PHP codebase that octal digits are supported at all, and they don't use strtol correctly. Note that perl, python and ruby all support octal digits correctly, there really is no excuse for PHP and javascript not to.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#209

Post by homosaur »

ohwp wrote: post #70
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 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.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#210

Post by 5h »

kmfrk wrote: post #156

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 onl…

Not that I disagree with your post, especially the rel="next" part, but I wonder what the problem with syncing is when using chrome & signed into a google account? ... it does the job well for me over 4 or so devices.
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