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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.
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.
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/
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.
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.