Opera Confirms It Will Follow Google and Ditch WebKit For Blink

An anonymous reader writes "Google on Wednesday made a huge announcement to fork WebKit and build a new rendering engine called Blink. Opera, which only recently decided to replace its own Presto rendering engine for WebKit, has confirmed with TNW that it will be following suit. 'When we announced the move away from Presto, we announced that we are going with the Chromium package, and the forking and name change have little practical influence on the Opera browsers. So yes, your understanding is correct,' an Opera spokesperson told TNW. This will affect both desktop and mobile versions of Opera the spokesperson further confirmed."

Comments

Re:So webkit != Blink!

[hairyfeet]

Yeah because we've never seen that go wrong in the past...quirks mode anyone?

Ya know the more crap like this they pull the more I distrust Google. Call me weird but even though I don't agree with the FOSS guys on a LOT of issues frankly I trust them more to put the user #1 over what is best for supermegacorp Google Maybe I'm wrong, and I honestly hope that I am but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if this "great new engine" just so happens, purely by accident of course, make it a royal pain in the ass to use something like ABP with it.

I know a lot of the more hardcore here think of me as "Mr Proprietary Guy" but I really really REALLY don't like this feeling I've been getting of these supermegacorps trying to go back to the "good old days" of every damned thing on the web ending up needing or having to depend on some corp for the web. i thought it sucked when it was "Works best in IE" and I think "Works best in webkit" sucks just as hard but at least with fucking Webkit I don't HAVE to take Google's version, or Apple's version, hell I could make my OWN version from the source if I wanted to go through the trouble (I use the Comodo variant instead, after flirting briefly with SWIron and Chromium) but whenever I hear of a big corp like that suddenly switching gears like that all I can think is...what is the catch? I mean if they just want to remove some features for their mobile Chome they can do that NOW and if they changes work I honestly wouldn't be surprised if upstream would go along, so what is the angle?

I have a feeling I KNOW what the catch is, its the same damned thing I have been saying for a few years when it first seemed like every company was trying to rip off not only Apple's thunder but their control freak nature, its that good old fashioned pain in our collective asses known as lock in. Google has the same kind of power MSFT had in the 90s so I have a feeling I'm gonna end up seeing "This site requires Blink x.x" in the not to distant future...man am I the ONLY one that has this sinking feeling in the middle of my guts that for the first time since i got into computers in the early 80s that computing is gonna get WORSE not better in the future?

Because I don't know about the rest of you but I so do NOT want to end up locked into some corporate wet dream of "locked down, black box, kiss our appstore" cellphones and tablets that I have to toss every time the stock dips because "hey the web requires Blink! Version 4 and your device will only support Version 3, now get out there and consume you lazy peasant" kind of bullshit, but sadly that is what we're gonna be heading towards, hell you won't even be able to unlock the damned thing without running afoul of DMCA.