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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. 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. The only thing their browser is really excellent at is IIRC browsing porn or generally image galleries with lots of image content. They were excellent at it even in their humble beginning days, where it was ad sponsored free or ad-free paid for -- you basically needed Opera to browse porn over a modem connection on a low-end machine (486DX2 w/Windows 95). With the switch to webkit, they lose whatever technical advantages they might have had.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
The only thing their browser is really excellent at is IIRC browsing porn or generally image galleries with lots of image content.
BS. I have a limited data plan, and I use Opera to reduce the amount of $$$ I pay. And it works extremely well. So what if my data routes through a server? It goes through various central points anyway. I know Opera can see my surfing habits, and adapt my surfing behaviour accordingly.
Privacy is important, but it is ridiculous to assert that it is the only thing to take into consideration.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly they've let it go to shit the past several releases, probably because they knew they were walking away from it. my oldest was a die HARD Opera user, he wouldn't touch a system without Opera and used to carry Opera portable on a stick so he wouldn't have to use anything else but even he is trying various browsers because he says Opera gets slower and buggier with each release.
If they are gonna abandon presto I really wish they'd open up the code, who knows what good could be made of an open presto engine. After all Mozilla rose from the ashes of netscape, maybe with it open devs could make presto so good opera would end up switching back.
Of course all this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room which the EU and DoJ really REALLY needs to investigate, and that is Apple's ability to influence the market with their monopolistic practices. Before some Applelite chimes in with "Apple isn't a monopoly" bullshit, total bullshit, look up the wording. it says you do NOT need 100% of the market, you don't even have to own the majority of the market, just that you have the power to assert undue influence and you would be hard pressed to find anybody that says Apple doesn't seriously influence the markets. From the prices of books to whether the web will run on an open format like Theora VS a locked down H.264 ALL of the major calls about the web made in the last couple of years has been made with iPhone in mind.
Do you think Opera would be ditching presto if it could run on the iPhone? Do you think we'd be forced to run HTML V5 before its ready or use a patent troll format like H.264 if iPhone users could choose between that and Flash and WebM and Drac and Theora? No if the company of St Steve of Cupertino says "it is thus" then that is what it is gonna be, no choices in the matter. And I think they need to be investigated as NO company should have that power, I was against MSFT using IE to gain control and I'm against Apple using iPhone/iPad to gain more control. No matter what device or OS you use the web should be about choice, not some corp laying down the law.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.