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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.
I download their browser from time to time, but only to see if it's the best. It never is, and I never use it again. Am I part of that 300 million?
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.
This is bad news. Another step on the way to browser monoculture, with all the problems that can bring. Next thing Firefox will switch to Webkit and we'll have only Webkit browsers and IE left.
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.
One of the reasons I didn't use Opera was actually because Web developers never tended to create content with Opera's rendering engine in mind. This lead to a few weird quirks on some badly(lazy?) coded web pages, sometimes breaking the whole thing altogether. Now, I'm going to give Opera another go. I really like browsers features, however now I don't need to compromise my web experience on the rendering level in order to use it. Good move in my opinion, as I don't think the web really benefits from multipul rendering engines /unless/ one of them goes stale and prevents innovation (Anyone remember Internet Explorer 6?). So long as the rendering engine to webkit or Mozilla's web engine allows the web to grow, I am happy with only one or two out there.
Do the Scandinavians hate to be away from the mobile phone markets?
Just speculation, but I wonder if this is cost related. It can't be cheap to keep Presto up to par with Webkit and Gecko. Using Webkit instead means they can spend less money on that, and devote more to the UI without particularly affecting the browser's standards compliance.
So in that sense it seems like a sound business decision.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Who is the competitor to the W3C now then? Competition is not a good thing, when it comes to standards. The only question is, who is best to take the standard forward: the W3C, or the webkit implementors? Either choice creates a monopoly, but with the latter choice, it's a monopoly that produces a working and free implementation.
The point is, when implementations are free, why do we need paper standards at all?
To what end are they doing this? I was never a big fan of Opera, but somebody was. Their engine was one of the big things that made them different. Now that they've switched to webkit, can anybody tell me what makes them different from Chrome now?
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.
As a web developer, I should be happy about this development, but the fact is: Opera was always standards compliant and as a user I liked how it rendered pages (qucikly and without any white screen gaps between page loads).
But it probably makes sense for them. Webkit is solid and their costs will probably go down dramatically.
Opera was the first alternative browser available on iOS as a result of Opera Mini being classified as a "remote content viewer" rather than a browser.
Well, it has worked for Apple well enough...
Do you mean rendering engine?
After all the complaints of slashvertisements yesterday, at least something is back to what we are used to over the last 15 years. Complete lack of grammar and editing.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Well, because of all the other features. The rendering engine was never a reason to choose opera over them in the first place – it was much slower, especially the javascript engine.
The point is, when implementations are free, why do we need paper standards at all?
A standards organization is made up of industry members who are stakeholders and other interested parties. It's a democracy, which is why standards are always so slow in coming. An implementation is necessarily owned and managed by a much smaller group; democracy-styled software development management doesn't work.
The system we have now where we have standards organizations which are sufficiently careful and methodical and multiple implementations with one or more also acting as testbeds is serving us well. It just happens that WebKit an implementation with many benefits and so is eating the lunches of the others, but let's not jump to the false conclusion that a single open-or-otherwise implementation would serve us just as well.
It's really better for browsing image galleries, especially over poor connections. Other than that I agree.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You live on this cloud nine where standards are complete and leave nothing up for interpretation, and where implementations of the standards are bug-free and introduce no vendor-specific extensions. Alas, in the real world, it's not that way.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It was a shame when they ditched Unite, it was very innovative imo. I wish they would re-release it, possibly as a separate software package.
Opera for iOS operated in this fashion - it's a hack forced on Opera by the wonderful people at crApple.
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Drama queen
Not Oprah.... OP-ER-A
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
How exactly does this work? If we had a monoculture (like we had with IE6), people code to the monoculture, standards be damned. If WebKit implements a standard badly, no amount of complaining by Microsoft and Mozilla will cause the WebKit folks to change their browser rendering to be compliant. And just like what happened with IE6, web developers will ignore the standard in favor of the WebKit implementation. We're ALREADY seeing this happen - webkit has sufficient market share that sites don't bother building standards compliant version of their mobile site, they just write for webkit and consider their work done.
History has shown that if you have a monoculture, standards are irrelevant - the only thing that matters is the one implementation.
Opera's javascript engine was pretty fast a few years ago, before chrome existed. It was way faster than firefox's, ie's or safari's.
Then chrome arrived and, although opera's engine has evolved a lot and is faster than ever, it never managed to reclaim its first place, even letting firefox claim the second place in the javascript speed race.
Who is the competitor to the W3C now then? Competition is not a good thing, when it comes to standards.
WHATWG
JavaScript is not Java.
Just in case you where not making a funny.
Actually, Opera Mini works this way on Android as well.
Opera Mobile is the more classical version of Opera for mobile devices.
Except in webkit's case, nobody actually controls it. Sure, Google, Apple and Co do spend a lot of money paying developers to work on it, but the thing is open-source. Can they all just fork it at some point and turn the forks proprietary. Probably, but why would they? They already share the load on developing the thing, why wouldn't they continue sharing? It would also create fragmentation in their userbase, they really don't want that.
There was one FUDster some months ago that was on a website that was arguing against Webkit because, wait for it, it contained "proprietary" technologies. Yes "proprietary" tech in a open-source product. Just how stupid do those jackasses think we are anyways?!
You're assuming Opera is a browser developers actually worry about. At less than 2% market share, Opera actually concerns me as a developer less than IE7 on typical projects.
Opera integrates the different components much more tightly than, say, Thunderbird and Firefox. Email and IRC effectively become just another tab and it allows them to share resources so that they're more efficient than having separate programs for each one. It'd be great if Opera released a light version with just the browser, but I don't think you'd really see huge improvements by removing those features simply because they are so well integrated.
Opera is dead after this move. Ever since the founder of Opera left (forced out) Opera has been a sinking ship.
It was good know you Opera, the web browser that could fit on a floppy in my Windows 98 days.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Why would someone use anything other than Chrome or Chromium on any platform?
On Mac, one good reason would be because it is just 32 bit - unlike the rest of the system. This means that e.g. java does not work in Chrome on Mac. While that might be seen as a good thing at some times ;), this means that you can't use many of the banks here in Norway - or do online credit card payments.
Also, some might think that Google knows enough about you already...
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.
Their control is accepted by all developers, if indeed that is the case. The minute they turn rotten, is the minute they lose "control". See the OpenOffice - > LibreOffice case.
Yet when developers add features, it's called bloat. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
What, you prefer "prima donna"?
It'd be great if Opera released a light version with just the browser, but I don't think you'd really see huge improvements by removing those features simply because they are so well integrated.
Case in point: Is SeaMonkey significantly larger than Mozilla Firefox?
Why an all-in-one?
Personally, I don't want an all-in-one. But, some people don't want to switch between applications. They just want to move from one tab to another. That's cool, I guess. I'm far more comfortable with separate applications, almost always spread between several virtual desktops. The wife, on the other hand, has never used virtual desktops, and seldom switches between applications. She's a better multi-tasker than I am, in real life, but on the computer, hang it up. One window, one desktop, one app. She'll create an insane number of tabs in Firefox, but it's all in Firefox.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The W3C requires at least two implementations of a standard before it can become a Recommendation. Thus, Google needs at least one ally with its own independent browser implementation to push standards through to Recommendation status. Of the five major browser vendors (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera), three of them (Google, Apple and Opera) are now all using a single rendering engine: Webkit. Apple may have a separate JavaScript engine, but it's a fierce competitor of Google, as is Microsoft. This leaves only Opera and Mozilla as potential standards partners, and Opera just went Webkit/V8. So, basically, Mozilla becomes Google's de facto ally for Web standards. (As if they weren't already, considering WebRTC.)
Congratulations, Mozilla. Your continued Google funding is assured.
You can certainly install the Java for Chrome on Macintosh, but you are limited to Java 6 as the most recent. Google provides a link to the instructions on how to do this.
http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2429779
which links to...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5559?viewlocale=en_US
--
BMO
Imagine if we had said that a few years ago, when IE6 ruled the market. Without the competition from Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror, among others, do you think Microsoft would have ever improved their browser?
Competition is good. I happen to like Webkit, but I'm not looking forward to a world in which EVERYONE uses webkit. Someone needs to be odd man out, doing things differently, and looking for "the next big thing" in web browsers.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I don't know if you actually believe that, but just in case anyone else comes along this path, Java and JavaScript are entirely separate from each other. They have absolutely nothing in common, except that the syntax for both is descended from C. And there was a licensing deal to use the Java name.
If you want to disagree (can't see why you'd want to), give evidence.
A common open-source base implementation for core features of a class of applications for which interoperability is an important feature isn't the same thing as a monopoly. It doesn't have any of the problems that come from a monopoly (it may have some of the problems associated with monoculture, which is a different issue than a monopoly.)
That's actually the selling point of having a common base open source implementation. Everyone can focus their development efforts on their unique interests, and at the same time pull in the common features from the base rather than, if they want features that someone else has, having to reinvent the wheel to implement on top of a different base engine.
No, it saves time to pull from upstream rather than reinventing the wheel for common features, which frees up resources for innovating for innovative features. This means that features that are intended to work the same across browsers actually will, while more resources are available for each vendor to implement new features.
The idiots who fall for obvious and old trollbait?
How does the Opera company stay alive?
They've been in operation since... about late '90s? But how exactly? A feature story on them is long overdue.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Oh, like sanscript isn't a language to model sand casting?
rewriting history since 2109
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.
It's true that WebKit is becoming a de facto standard, but I don't really see this as a problem. Some people say it's just like what happened with IE6, but there are several reasons why that was much more problematic:
WebKit doesn't have any of these problems. It's a free, open-source rendering engine that can and does run on just about any modern computing platform. Even though the official source tree is curated by Apple, there is major buy-in from other stakeholders including Google and Adobe, and any attempt by Apple to freeze others out would almost certainly result in a swift fork (just as happened with OpenOffice.org after the Oracle acquisition). The decade-long stagnation of the Web under the reign of IE6 was the result of a lot of very specific circumstances; it can't be replicated again, and certainly not with WebKit.
Opera has announced that they will be dropping their rendering ending
I'd say something like "are the editors even trying any more?" if it hadn't been so clear for so long that no, they're not.
They've already submitted patches to improve multi-column layouts even.
Oy vey, what is dis, submit like an old Jewish man day?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We already have the 'standard was the implementation' bullshit in Office Open XML. We don't need another in HTML/CSS.
Well, first of all, the 'implementation' of OOXML was not and is not open source, so it cannot be examined or freely used. For another thing, OOXML is more complicated by an order of magnitude than HTML/CSS.
my bad, it's to convert serif fonts.
rewriting history since 2109
Consider the goal: invariably produce specific output for specific input. Given certain markup, styles, and scripts, there's an expected result, and that result should be the same across all browsers. That's is why we have standards. Those standards help make the Web a great platform.
What, then, is the purpose of WebKit, Gecko, Presto, and Trident—four modern browser engines—all consuming development resources, each in pursuit of the exact same standards? If each were successful, we'd have four completely duplicative pieces of software when we only need exactly one.
Some people here are claiming about monoculture. Well, sorry, these aren't biological organisms. Imagine if, instead of having resources divided four ways, those resources were focused on a single project (or, at least, some of those resources were contributing to projects that aren't waste heat). These products are nearly as complex as operating systems. Think about what could be accomplished with all that poorly allocated effort?
Now Opera have come in and helped illustrate my point. They finally realized it's inefficient for them to reinvent the wheel a fourth time. (Maybe Microsoft will do the same.) They may have also realized all this redundant effort also create unnecessary work for web developers, who must perform grueling work and testing to understand and react to the subtle differences in all these engines. With this decision, they can get their engineering talent to focus on useful development, and they've saved the rest of us quite a bit of time, too.
Personally, I don't want an all-in-one
Me neither, normally
However, to me sites like StackOverflow and newsgroups or mailinglists pretty much represent the same activity (over different protocols). I really like having those together in the same application, and Opera merges those rather nicely.
On top of that they where the first to implement tabs, which for me was the initial reason to start using Opera. And afaik they are still the only browser to have mouse gestures out of the box, something which I wouldn't want to do without anymore.
Where if Hixie don't like it, it ain't happening.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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.
If WebKit implements a standard badly, no amount of complaining by Microsoft and Mozilla will cause the WebKit folks to change their browser rendering to be compliant.
Assuming there's malice involved and the WebKit developers have an interest in breaking the web, which nobody seems to argue. They just add experimental features that aren't standardized yet, lazy developers use the experimental tags and don't bother to make it work on anything else. I don't see how they can do it any other way, unless they hold off on all development until the W3C gets around to making a final standard, which doesn't exactly happen quick. If there was a real unwillingness to make WebKit standards-compliant you could fork and try building momentum for that, but I don't see that we have a xfree86 vs xorg situation here, just lazy developers but that's hardly a problem WebKit could fix.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Those links are all over 2 years old, so don't really prove anything about the performance of Opera now. Especially considering how much webkit has developed in that time, and the shift in focus towards JS performance. The second link even says to stop posting it on Slashdot because it's so outdated.
Why are web browsers considered so special that people want them to be things other than web browsers?
You've got that backwards. It's not that web browsers are "considered so special", it's that all of the other services you mentioned are considered so useful that it just makes sense to have them all in one place.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's not really a hack. Opera Mini has always operated the way it does. It wasn't something they came up with just to get Opera onto iOS. That being said, this change may result in Opera Mobile being made available on iOS as well.
Opera Mini itself is not a hack, Opera Mini on iOS is a hack.
Does anybody seriously believe that Opera wouldn't create a native application full blown 'non mini' browser for iOS if crApple weren't such jerks about their walled garden?
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Not really, all public companies are the devil - they are legally required to be as soon as they have public shareholders.
Operating Systems are just tools in the toolbox. I could give a sh** which one someone else uses; ergo, I doubt anyone gives a sh** about which ones I use (especially since I use pretty much all of them.)
I must admit though, IRIX has always been one giant stinking pile o' crap.
Natalie Portman is pretty hot, although, I'm more of a Xena Warrior Princess liking type. I like women who are not likely to break during sex.
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I have a large Android handset (Razr xt890), the Opera Mobile browser is brilliant for quick access to my favourite sites - the UI is perfectly tuned for use as a news, weather, forums browser (big icons for faves as it starts, and its incredibly fast). Other stuff, I use Chrome on it as my bookmarks sync to that...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
"We're ALREADY seeing this happen - webkit has sufficient market share that sites don't bother building standards compliant version of their mobile site, they just write for webkit and consider their work done."
Shitty developers will go the lazy route and target the browser with the biggest share. Unfortunately, there are a lot of shitty web developers out there, many are borderline scam artists. My brother works for a small web dev company and they have a few big name clients. They always test every one of their sites on multiple browsers including Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and IE 6/7/8/9 on both Windows XP/7/8 and Mac OS (mobile browsers usually work if the page works correctly on the desktop browsers). Of course its not easy and often IE is a real steaming pile (especially 6/7/8) but they get the job done and done right.
He was trolling, moron.
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.
Apple may own today's master branch, but if Apple started doing anything stupid with it, Google would fork and Opera (etc.) would have the option to follow. Google is not beholden to Apple, and vice versa; that stalemate keeps Webkit neutral.
The only danger comes from the possibility of collusion between Google and Apple to break the web...and those two are barely on speaking terms.
He was trolling morons.
FTFY
rewriting history since 2109
Hmm. But how much of that speed was due to their massive web caching servers?
The one killer feature of Opera that has stopped me from moving to another browser has been the address bar. To my knowledge, no other browser has the same functionality as the Opera address bar, and I haven't found one add-on that mimics that functionality.
The address bar in other browsers works quite simply: if the entered string is a web address, the browser goes to that page. If it isn't a web address, it does a Google search.
Opera implements multiple search engines and bookmarks directly into the address bar. For instance, if I type "w" into my Opera address bar, it goes through my bookmarks, finds that I've tagged Wikipedia with "w", then shows me the Wikipedia front page. If I type "w %s", it does a Wikipedia search on %s. The bookmark tag and the search engine don't have to be related in any way: "alpha" alone takes me to Memory Alpha, while "alpha" and a search term does a Wolfram Alpha query.
https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/opera-software-open-presto-sources?utm_campaign=twitter_link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition
https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/opera-software-open-presto-sources?utm_campaign=twitter_link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition
But you can improve the performance and quality of Google products by sending all your information to them!
Opera I'm going to miss you! You used to be so small fast and configurable. Now you seem big and bloated rarely using less than 700MB for only 30 or 40 tabs.
You still save my sessions automatically while the others require plugins, you lead the way again and again making browsing better not just for your users but for everyone. Now you're throwing in the towel to Google, Microsoft and Firefox(which I don't hate I just don't like), leaving yourself open to patent trolls and big business shenanigans (IE:that's a proprietary standard or custom rendering that makes no sense and causes you months of work to duplicate because it was developed by throwing tonnes of lousy developers at it, ala pdf).
This is going to bite you in the butt, you know it I know it.
I'm sure you have your reasons and once you get on your feet again your brilliant contributions will make things better again... in the meantime I may watch from the sidelines trapped inside the chrome ecosystem, which doesn't have opera:config...
All the best in the future.
No. Apple forked KDE's KHTML into WebKit.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Google bets their entire company on the web becoming a competent and competitive application platform and they're heavily invested in WebKit. There's no way Google is going to allow WebKit to slow down, whether there are competing rendering engines or not.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Not quite.
In style of all the other features they copied, Firefox and Chrome both do this now... Both for address and keywords.
But Opera's keyword search is better because it can handle POST requests whereas Firefox's and Chrome's cannot. So you cannot keyword Google Translate (Or similar services) with excessively long strings. Also, many searches are exclusively POST-based.
I honestly use [Ctrl] + [L] more often than any other key combination because I have so many keywords. (Notice the scrollbar? That list has grown since then too.)
I usually set my default address bar search to Google's "I'm feeling lucky" because it usually goes to the right website without ever needing to see a results page. (Keyword address is "http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=%s" if you want it.)
It even goes to Google search if things are too ambiguous.
The only downside are some automagic suggestions, they won't show up unless you specify the default Google search keyword yourself. (In my case, "g".)
The arch foe.
Every time I've tried Opera, I think, "weird." Then I read comments that say things like, "it was first at this, or this, or this, and it's better at that." How many people are actually using Opera on a regular basis? Just wondering.
If there is only one implementation then what is the point of having standards? Not having enough competing implementations that keep each other sharp and make it meaningful for the makers to complyto a shared standard is what prevents the world from being burdened with another IE6.
Mod parent up. Let's add to that. Without multiple implementations it's often impossible to tell if the standard is complete. It's not until you find two different people reading it and writing software (think "the first byte will be set to one" - is that the left or the right hand byte?) that you find out that it isn't completely specified. The internet standards even explicitly say that you shouldn't have a standard before you have at least two different implementations to bake off.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Who is the competitor to the W3C now then?
Microsoft? :)
Because some people don't like its overly minimalistic UI.
You could always switch to SRWare Iron.
- No Bounce, No Play -
The former CEO was a visionary that created the company and founded it on technical excellence. The current CEO is a sales guy. Killing Presto is said.
1) This will kill the crew morale; most of the dev's will quit.
2) Opera may continue to grow for a bit; just like Dell did when it started to outsource more and more manufacturing, and then design to asian companies. (One of those companies is now known as Asus). But it the long run, having no technology, it will deteriorate.
Please mod parent up.
I've been following Firefox development for some time and this echos my sentiment as well.
There are a constellation of reasons why Mozilla will not switch to Webkit. One of those reasons is the one that has been mentioned several times in the comments: avoiding a browser monoculture.
Mozilla is very ideologically driven and understands that there is as much a danger of Webkit becoming a danger to the web (especially the mobile web lately) through monoculture as there once was with IE. It was from that environment that Mozilla formed and Firefox was born. And this belief remains engrained in their DNA.
How is it just another Webkit clone? It's actually using Webkit. And how is using Webkit worse than using Presto?
Clever signature text goes here.
Just because something is innovative doesn't mean it ends up being picked up. Unite might have been innovative, but hardly anyone was using it.
Who claimed that removing features was innovative?
Clever signature text goes here.
If this was because Apple doesn't allow non-Webkit browsers, they would have switched to Webkit only on iOS.
Clever signature text goes here.
Yeah... It's a pretty old feature. But Opera was the one that created it.
This happens really often actually. For example, even right now Firefox is currently trying to integrate another Opera feature in its recent releases too. It's not fully functional, but try [RIght Click] + [Mousewheel Up] in the newest Firefox to switch tabs... (Down is broken)
The arch foe.
Vertical tabs done right, are what keep me with Opera. I often open a dozen windows at a time and the tabs only display well vertically.
Uh...have you used Chrome or Firefox in the last three years? You can do this shit already and have been able to for a long time.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
No, there's a big difference. This tyrant actually offers developer tools that aren't complete pieces of shit. Microsoft is so far behind the curve it's the fucking joke of the web developer community.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
It already exists. It's what Opera is by default when you install it. Mail and all that other stuff is disabled until you decide to start using it.
Clever signature text goes here.
That's great. But what if Google and Opera don't agree with you? That's the bulk of WebKit integrators that aren't following your fork, so where's it's impetus going to come from?
Do you seriously believe that if they start doing "evil" the userbase will keep using their products? Sure, they might not all jump ship, but most users will start using/evaluating other products.
There was one FUDster some months ago that was on a website that was arguing against Webkit because, wait for it, it contained "proprietary" technologies.
Are you sure it was against WebKit in general, or specifically against Google Chrome? Google Chrome for PCs includes Adobe Flash Player, for example.
The issue is that Apple would not let Opera release Opera Mobile, and thus Opera Mini had to become the face of Opera on iOS.
It was an article about the "dominance" of webkit. They did not attack a browser, they were saying stupid things about webkit and how it implements stuff that is not yet in the html5 standard. Thing is that HTML 5 is still "work in progress"
I mostly just follow the web standards and let the browser developers worry about support.
For the engines in question, that is the goal. It's not as if Trident is for screen readers and Gecko is for full-fledged browsers.
Then sign this to ask them to open source Presto: https://www.change.org/petitions/opera-software-open-sources-of-presto-engine
Dragonfly is good for inspecting, particularly for mobile with remote debugging, but I find Firebug and the Web Developer addon for Firefox easier to use. I guess I might just be used to right click + Q to inspect instead of navigating a menu ... albeit only about a 0.75 second time-saver, it's what I'm used to ... and the Web Developer toolbar allows quick highlighting of block elements like you were mentioning. Not to mention quick cache disable, js, all image sizes and paths on the page, and quick user agent access.
The one thing Opera does have that I LOVE is the Opera Mobile Emulator. Emulator plugins for Firefox still give spotty results, but even my weakest mobile detection scripts work with all presets in OME. This is more useful than the Dragonfly remote debugging even, in my opinion.
Well, it's really preference in the end. I've always found Firebug and Web Developer a bit clunky. Especially how they handle JavaScript. In Opera, we get a fancy schmancy pretty-print beautified version of code (Togglable) to make weird formatting readable. Every variable that is initialized can be inspected by hovering over them with the mouse.
This is debugging a mouseover event in minified jQuery.
As you can see, it's a lot easier to work with. I just hovered the mouse over elements to inspect them, and clicked on the HTMLDivElement to select it on the page. While not an ideal situation, it certainly is made easier because of Dragonfly.
One thing I like about Firebug that Dragonfly handles in a weird way is breaking on AJAX requests. But that's about my only complaint.
But that's just me. Different strokes for different folks.
and the Web Developer toolbar allows quick highlighting of block elements like you were mentioning. Not to mention quick cache disable, js, all image sizes and paths on the page, and quick user agent access.
Yeah... Dragonfly doesn't have disabling JavaScript and the sort because it's an option built into the browser already, so it would be redundant. I access them all through a my sidebar (Show/hide it with [F4]) and custom shortcuts, so it's all usually really fast.
I guess I might just be used to right click + Q to inspect instead of navigating a menu ...
You don't need to navigate a menu to inspect elements... That would be really tedious to use.
If you are on the Document tab in Dragonfly, you just need to click an element on the page to select it. No need to navigate DOM structure to pick something up.
Also, if you are in another tab, [Right Click] -> [I] does the same thing as [Right Click] -> [Q] does for you.
The arch foe.
A few years ago is not now. Try writing a game running in html5 canvas. You'll find roughly:
Chrome's rendering and javascript is plenty fast enough for most stuff.
Safari's rendering an javascript is plenty fast enough for most stuff on Mac OS. On windows, the rendering is dog slow.
Firefox's rendering and javascript is mostly fast enough, but can get bogged down.
IE's rendering is blistering fast, but it's javascript is abysmally slow.
Opera's javascript is somewhat slower than Firefox's, but faster than IE's. It's rendering is abysmally slow (even slower than safari on windows).
The point of standards is to regulate competing implementations. It's widely understood that competing standards = BAD (and they exist far too often in far too many industries, to their detriment; also, see this mandatory XKCD reference http://xkcd.com/927/ ) and competing implementations = GOOD (the alternative is an IE6 situation, which we're fast moving towards again with WebKit).
Here's an interesting article on the amount of *postitive* support there was from web developers for IE6 when it first came about... which does give me a strange sense of deja vu, even if the author of that particular blog post wouldn't agree.
I wonder how much this has to do with the average age of web programmers. With a development-community with such a short-term memory, I wonder will the inability to learn from past disasters (like IE6) lead to endless recursion ...
A few years ago is not now. Try writing a game running in html5 canvas.
I wrote one a few months ago for the github game-off: https://github.com/RonanL/game-off-2012
It's faster in chrome/chromium, but it's playable in firefox and opera.
I've written several tests to optimize canvas rendering. I found that chrome benefits a lot more from pre-rendering in an hidden canvas, while firefox doesn't benefit from it at all. Opera is about twice as fast as firefox for pure canvas rendering, and a little faster than chrome.
Keep in mind, I only test rendering a small (12x12px) image, and a game is a lot more than that: pure js performance is very important and not tested here at all.
Here are my test results right now (on linux, with several tabs open in chrome but only one in opera):
Chrome 24:
Draw 100k sprites: 0.551s
Draw 100k sprites in a buffer: 0.370s
Draw 100k sprites with a rotation: 2.193s
Draw 100k sprites with a rotation in a buffer: 2.145s
Draw rotate a sprite in a buffer, the draw it 100k times in another buffer: 0.427s
Opera 12.12:
0.441s
0.344s
1.964s
1.856s
0.344s
Firefox 17:
0.815s
0.892s
4.267s
3.897s
3.085s
Will we see a J2ME version of Opera + webkit?