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Opera Picks Up Webkit Engine
New submitter nthitz writes "Opera has announced that they will be dropping their rendering engine Presto, in favor of Webkit. This knocks the number of major rendering engines down to three. Opera will also be adopting the Chromium V8 Javascript engine. The news coincides with their announcement of 300 million users. '300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on,' says Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. 'On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.'"
They've already submitted patches to improve multi-column layouts even.
Don't forget that Opera is more that just a desktop browser. It really shines on mobile platforms with Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. The Wii's web browser is also Opera.
From what I hear, they're really big in second and third world countries where bandwidth is more limited and/or you pay by the kilobyte. Opera excels at compressing the content (especially with Opera Turbo).
Maybe because of features other than the rendering engine? I prefer Opera's UI, but it's also great to use as a general web client with integrated email, IRC, torrents, etc.
Everything other than the rendering engine? That's what really set Opera apart. The email client is really nice and the IRC and torrent clients aren't bad. I also prefer the UI to Chrome.
Why this will never happen: http://browserfame.com/363/why-mozilla-gecko-will-not-adopt-webkit
Who owns the master branch? Who guards the commit gates from the hordes? There's your defacto controllers of WebKit - you can fork all you want, but you need to get the main users (the browser integrators, Google et al) to follow your branch rather than the master.
Apple owns the master branch.
For me, it's the best of Chrome (look, speed, good tabs, etc.) and Firefox (has about:config, intuitive, etc.). One thing that hasn't been copied from Opera yet that doesn't make any sense... Anytime you get a JavaScript alert box, Opera adds a little checkbox allowing you to stop executing scripts on the page. Ever accidentally land on a website that kept spewing off alerts without you being able to close the page except by killing it? Opera also did extensions right; they're super easy to make. Opera has always either been the first or the first to do it right. Hands down.
The G
The Wii's browser is god-awful. Probably why Nintendo switched to webkit for the 3DS and Wii U browsers.
Yeah, opera has a lot of builtin features that are great for porn browsing. (like finding the next/previous image based on a number in the url). I ran into an Opera engineer at a live sex show in Amsterdam a few years ago and he confirmed that porn was their original demographic -- use IE for regular browsing, opera for the stuff you don't want your wife/husband/kids to know about. (And porn ads were the most lucrative.) They used to have work orgies and such but that's tamed down now.
Opera has always either been the first or the first to do it right. Hands down.
You're not kidding. Opera's Multi-Document Interface (MDI) was the first foray into tabbed browsing nearly three years before anyone else.
I use Opera because it both has the best usage paradigm for me and integrates with pretty much everything I need to do online.
It takes far less time for me to do anything in Opera than it would in another browser. There are extensions for some Opera features in other browsers, like Mouse Gestures, user scripts, and user CSS. But they all lack capabilities that Opera's native version has. There are also no extensions for some Opera features like Tab stacking, or mass-refreshing, pinning, or deleting tabs and windows. (Complete with incremental tab search.) The website-independent settings settings are also awesome, I've used them to make my Slashdot hot pink for example. :)
Also, If I don't like Opera's interface... I can build it.
It has shortcuts for everything too, and if it doesn't, you can make them. One in particular I use is Mousewheel tab switching. Firefox has partial mousewheel tab-switching in it's current incarnations, but it only works with [Right Click] + [Mousewheel down].
Also I've seen mouse gesture extensions for other browsers, (The best extension is All-in-one gestures for Firefox since it also integrates Rocker Navigation.) but they don't encompass the entire browser and only web pages. So I can't use mouse gestures to close or navigate a settings menu for example.
It's sidebar is also really useful. I use it for things like controlling VLC, or E-Mail and RSS and Usenet, or looking at Opera's CPU usage, or contact management with incremental search an everything (No screenshot for this one because too much personal information), or controlling Transmission (Torrent program), or interacting with notes, or quickly turning on/off my proxies or masking my user agent, or managing my tabs and windows, or
Also, as a web developer... Opera has a lot of spiffy development features that lack in other browsers. Dragonfly has more capabilities than the Webkit inspector, for example it can inspect attached events in DOM nodes. There are also view modes built in that allow you to highlight element borders for debugging CSS or see DOM attributes inline. Autoreferesh is also good for debugging CSS and for repeating YouTube videos. :)
I glazed over most of it's features, and it's still many magnitudes more functional than other browsers.
How many extensions do you think I use to get this functionality? The correct answer is zero. And the browser takes up less space than either Firefox or Chrome when installed.
Is this a good enough reason to use Opera?
The arch foe.