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.

Comments

Re:Hopefully we can narrow this down to ONE

[cpicon92]

We don't need multiple rendering engines, we just need one standards compliant one

Ideally, yes that's true. In practice, this would result in the one becoming a defacto standard, and whomever controls the one controls the standard. We are already kind of seeing this with WebKit. Competition is never a bad thing.

Can we have the source, please?

[Dr. Spork]

The Presto rendering engine had some pretty decent performance, and was often the fastest among the graphical browsers. If it's being abandoned, wouldn't it be nice if it were made available as open source? Webkit isn't the right tool for every occasion. I hate to see something so good just die.

Re:What do they consider a user?

[xaxa]

Sorry, there no such thing as "excelling" at compression "especially" with Opera Turbo. The browser has zero control over compression, it can request plain old gzip compression from the server, and the server may or may not oblige. That's all that's available without a dedicated server. Opera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server.

So the first part of your comment was irrelevant, except to note in passing that Opera has always had good HTTP compression support, and other features to speed up page loading (e.g. not loading images, or loading them selectively).

It's hardly hijacking if they they tell you what they're doing, and you have to click a button to enable it:
When Opera Turbo is enabled, webpages are compressed via Opera's servers so that they use much less data than the originals. This means that there is less to download, so you can see your webpages more quickly.

Enabling Opera Turbo is as simple as clicking the Opera Turbo icon at the bottom-left of the Opera browser window. When you are on a fast connection again and Opera Turbo is not needed, the Opera browser will automatically disable it.
http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/

Re:What do they consider a user?

[v1]

pera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server. It's that server that then obtains the website content for you and compresses it. It's the only way technically to accomplish that, at the price of essentially giving yourself a man-in-the-middle attack. It's not very funny

And when you live in a small village in africa and an hour of smartphone use could cost a day's pay, you get mighty thankful for that compression. These aren't the sorts of people that do online banking and are worried about MitM. Many of them are very happy to exchange email with friends and relatives in another village, and text compresses very nicely.

Just because it's not the right feature for you doesn't mean there isn't a significant sized group that really appreciates it.