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Opera moves to WebKit

my.opera.com

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Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#231

Post by networked »

Their move is understandable, but it'll be something of a pity if this affects Opera's performance. From personal experience I can say that Opera is pretty much the only current browser that can deliver a combination of acceptable speed and rendering quality on really outdated x86 hardware.

I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't going to be the only ones affected.

Edit: rephrased for clarity.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#232

Post by simonster »

coldtea wrote: post #157
gcp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> 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.

In the case of canvas, not really. Apple created canvas for Dashboard widgets. Were it not standardized, canvas would never have been a web technology.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#233

Post by dylan-m »

ehamberg wrote: post #224

https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304 : New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents.

My new hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts that act like prefixed CSS styles are healthy standards that must be conformed to, and finding -o and -webkit prefixes without -dylans-browser equivalents.

Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that standard.

There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't using them at all.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#234

Post by ianb »

ralfd wrote: post #230
gcp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company. That's true, but those companies also make much more products. Mozilla has significantly less employees than Opera. What gives Google, Apple and Microsoft power is that they also own the platforms. (And now you'll understand why Firefox OS is a thing)

> Mozilla has significantly less employees than Opera Hu, really? Would have thought the opposite as Mozilla gets 100 million dollars a year from Google.

Wikipedia says that Opera has 777 employees as of a year ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software

That's a couple hundred more than Mozilla has now (after Mozilla added a lot of employees in the past few years). OTOH, the numbers are no longer that significantly different.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#236

Post by acqq »

Opera users were bullied by Google for years. Even when some Google's site would work perfectly in Opera when the Opera would identify itself as IE or Firefox, Google would sometimes even reject user's attempt to access some of their sites. To the users of Opera, it was obvious that it was done intentionally -- on Google scale, they were bullying up to 300 million users who mostly selected Opera exactly because it runs better on the less CPU-powerful hardware.

I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 Opera was my savior through the years.

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#237

Post by mikaelj »

bzbarsky wrote: post #176
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.

Doing this would mean being forever stuck in single-threaded land for rendering (e.g. nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could ever happen). People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact. So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores…

Are you implying Presto is multi-threaded?

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#238

Post by yogo »

jlarocco wrote: post #206
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.

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

Because in this case it is open? I'm not for having a single implementation but I wouldn't complain if every single browser used the same engine. It still won't be ideal but this by default removes any incompatibilities (assuming the same branch of code is used--a potential problem that will crop up).

Re: Opera moves to WebKit

#240

Post by mikaelj »

coldtea wrote: post #80
gcp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be forked and evolution can continue. Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.

> 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".

In a mono-culture you have no predators thus no evolution.
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