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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."
The real question is will the corps and users want to keep old versions of Chrome around for their web apps and sites?
Many with -webkit CSS extensions wont work if Chrome gets rid of them. If Google calls it -webkit then we will have 2 different versions and web developers will be confused and not know which is which when users report a site looks funny.
http://saveie6.com/
Says it all.
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
Remember: Don't Blink
One of these days slashdotters will fall out of love with google and see them for who they really are. Don't be evil? Right... The evil say that much like how dictatorships are called "Democratic Republic of".
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Opera is now Google's bitch -- dependent on Google for search bar revenue, dependent on Google for the Browser itself. They're Chrome with some slightly different, well, chrome.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Is there any chance Opera would consider open sourcing Presto since they plan to drop it?
I'm an Opera user, I use it mostly because I like its UI and sidebar panel. Killer feature I liked was the password manager, just hit the key icon and login onto a site, even if you have many popups of the same domain, logging into a single page logged you into all of them automagically. Firefox still bugged me at that time with a username/password per page and that was what drove me over to Opera.
Opera used to have SpeedDial well before Chrome and Firefox but both of them have similar versions now along with tabbed browsing etc...
Opera didn't always work on all sites, but it's UI and general features made it worth it. Hopefully they keep it, its sad to see Presto go but with Webkit/Blink I guess we get more performance and compatibility.
Instead they are hitching their wagon to a convenient big horse instead of just being an innovative company. And i think that it will end badly. There is no reason to believe that Google will not increasing put closed source components into Blink. There is no reason for Google to eventual be civil with Apple, in the way that Apple was eventually civil with KHTML. At some point, unless Opera has some sort of secret agreement with Google, it can only be assumed that they will not have a guaranteed future.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They're obviously hurting financially. By switching to Webkit (and now Blink) they were able to lay off over 90 developers, some of whom had been with the company for 15 years. This sucks - for the developers, obviously, but I'm sure nobody was happy about making that call; but according to salarylist.com, the average software developer salary is around $81,000/yr which times 90 developers is 7.29 MILLION dollars a year. Not sure if Norway dev pay is equivalent to the US average, but you get the rough picture. That sort of sum could make or break Opera as a company.
I've been a fan of Opera browser for a very long time - I started using it right after it became free. Opera pioneered a great deal of features that are browsing must-haves today, implementing them years before any competitor. They remind me of another company that hailed from their land-mass-sharing-neighbors in Sweden: Saab. A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board. The first to do this, the first to do that - turbochargers on production cars, cabin air filters, very high crash safety standards, active seat belts (okay, that one didn't last long), active head rest restraints, refrigerated glove box (for taking that Chardonnay to the picnic of course), headlight washers, heated seats, the use of computers to automatically monitor and adjust the engine's operations based on the type of fuel used and sensor input, direct ignition, traction control, air conditioned seats, etc, etc, etc. Now compare to this list of Opera 'firsts':
http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
Saab was bought by GM. When that happened, all their cars were mandated to be cross-platform cars. They shared chassis with other cars; some models (and SUV and a hatchback) were blatant rebadges of a GM SUV and a Subaru (nicknamed the Saaburu). Now Saab is no more.
Sounds like what is happening to Opera, unfortunately.
I know 'car metaphors' are a Slashdot tradition, but I find this one particularly apt.
I use Opera.
I don't use it for it's rendering engine, but rather for all of the functionality it has by default that other browsers simply cannot do. (Even with extensions.) So, the fact that it is becoming more compatible with most websites is great news for me. It means they can continue to innovate like they have done for years. (Most modern browsers use things that were created by Opera ages ago.)
They are not becoming Google's bitch because rendering was never their main feature, they are simply adopting the engine that everyone develops for while retaining the functionality that Opera users actually use. Sure, some of us will decry the switch because Presto was one helluva light engine and we lose the work done on it, but other then that, this is actually good news.
The arch foe.
So you never cared about the Opera interface and features, just about making sure websites fail to render correctly?
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re: One of these days slashdotters will fall out of love with google and see them for who they really are. /. and fsdn to post on /. and I can't vote articles up or down unless I enable google-fu / google-analytics / google-api and I don't allow that.
:>)
This slashdotter already has fallen out of love with google. I've got no google accounts and google-crap is noscripted out and DNS-blocked. I only have to allow
I'm an Opera user myself and while I agree that (one of) the main reason(s) for this preference was the functionality of the whole thing, I did like the Opera rendering engine, and often found it to be more standard-compliant than other engines, even when it had less coverage. I'm a little afraid that the Blink switch will break some of the functionalities I've been relying on (such as the ‘presentation mode’ in full-screen).
On the other hand, with the Blink/WebKit fork we are probably going to have three main engines again, and this is a good thing.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
I'm sorry. I don't get car metaphors. Could you restate your argument as a superhero metaphor?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Opera really wasn't the first in most cases, and they implemented the features very POORLY, only to have other browsers eventually come along and show them the right way to do it.
Tabs: Opera was second behind another little known IE shell, and their method of cycling tabs in LAST-USED order, and having those tabs appear as loose windows INSIDE of the Opera window was a nightmare that resembled MS Office 7's multiple open document windows, more than it does modern tabbed browsers. In fact, when Mozilla came out with tabs, OPERA COPIED THEM, so now Opera has TWO completely different methods of handling tabs. What made Mozilla's tabs great was the "open in background" option... With that, I'd be perfectly happy managing dozens of windows. It was the "new windows" opening in the foreground and having to be moved that was the real hassle, and the innovation.
Pop-up blocking: Worked poorly in Opera. It blocked the majority of popups, but several still got through, and in the process it broke plenty of legit sites. Mozilla did it right. And everybody and their mother thought up pop-up blocking long before Opera or anyone else did it... The devil is in the implementation details.
Fit to Window: I was crying, loudly, in public forums, for this feature on my PDA for YEARS and YEARS before Opera released it. Their implementation was over simplistic, more like disabling style sheets or removing the "<table" tags than what we use today. So they don't get credit for implementing the current smartphone browser zoom and fit-to-width methods (which do things much differently).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Strange, I thought Bing was the default search engine.
Very nice comparison, and I agree with you about the silliness of dumping quality engineers to increase the profit level or save a little money. It's a short term gain for a much worse long term loss. I didn't know about all of those Saab innovations. Thanks for the details.
It's lacking what, exactly? In many instances, it has more functionality by default, since it doesn't require plugins for things that should be standard.
Ctrl+F12 > Search > Untick "enable search suggestions."
I was already sad about Presto. Now this.
A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board.
Pioneering things means nothing if you can't make money in the process and by the late 1980s when GM got involved Saab wasn't making money.
Saab was bought by GM. When that happened, all their cars were mandated to be cross-platform cars. They shared chassis with other cars; some models (and SUV and a hatchback) were blatant rebadges of a GM SUV and a Subaru (nicknamed the Saaburu). Now Saab is no more.
Saab wasn't bought by GM at first, GM basically invested in Saab until they finally bought them out. The shared chassis thing is also BS since Saab ignored it for most cars or basically rebuilt the whole thing anyway. Saab was bleeding money the whole time GM owned them and things like the shared chassis were attempts to stop that. Which Saab ignored until going bankrupt.
In fact, apart from the venerable iCab on macs (and, much more recent, on ipads), is there just any rendering engine that's still developed by a single individual out there?
(before you start shrugging, let's remind iCab invented ad filtering some ten years before Mozilla was *born*)
Herve S.
I'm sorry. I don't get car metaphors. Could you restate your argument as a superhero metaphor?
Opera's becoming Superman with a load of kryptonite stuffed up his arse? Chromium's the Silver Surfer with his cock cut off. IE is Iron Man without batteries. Firefox is Woody from Toy Story.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The point of using Opera is that it has the features you need. Presto was a necessary evil (since lots of sites didn't support it). You can probably count on one hand the number of people who used Opera because of presto.
Clever signature text goes here.
They aren't just skinning an existing browser on iOS (does the Opera ICE demo look like just a skin to you?), nor are they doing it on other platform. Using a browser framework doesn't mean you are merely reskinning another browser using the same framework.
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Hurting financially? Whatever gave you that idea? They've reached new profit and revenue highs every single quarter now for a long time.
They didn't lay off 90 developers. They laid off 90 people in total, including sales and marketing personnel. About half were engineers, which includes testers. So the real number of programmers is probably around 20 or so, which is a very small number compared to the several hundred developers that are still working there.
Being bought sounds like what is happening to Opera? Um, but it isn't. In fact, it's Opera doing the acquisitions.
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Opera isn't dependent on Google for the browser. They just happened to choose a specific technology platform
How do you know the chrome is only slightly different to Chrome?
If Opera is Google's bitch now, that's not new. That must be because 1/3 of their revenue is from Google. But that's going to change since other business areas (such as ads) are growing very quickly.
In fact, I would say that Opera is less of a Google bitch now than it was just 6-12 months ago.
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If Google close it or do anything worth forking for, Opera will fork.
http://www.chromium.org/blink#participating
Blink is based on webkit which itself is based on KHTML which
is LGPL, not GPL
In other words, you claim that WebKit is based on LGPL code. I thought that like GPL code, LGPL code had to be made available for the end user to modify, and devices shipping with LGPL code had to ship with "scripts to control installation" (v2) or "Installation Information" (v3) to let the user install modified versions. So how do manufacturers of locked-down devices that use WebKit, such as Apple with its iDevices, get away with not shipping Installation Information? Or has all LGPL code been stripped out by now like the original parts of the Ship of Theseus?
before pensioning off Presto...
You're a retard. Chrome is the very definition of the OPPOSITE of stagnation. Google is very active in the development of Chrome and has been since their inception. You can thank them for spurring Mozilla and Microsoft to get off of their asses and make the web better.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Oh, they are lost are they? How so? And when did that happen, exactly?
They seem to know exactly what to do, considering that they have more users than ever, and are constantly reaching new revenue and profit heights.
What common behavior is Opera lacking, and won't that automatically fix itself with Webkit or Blink?
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How have they yielded any authority in the standards process? Have they been blocked from the W3C?
Focus on the boring bits? Quite the opposite. Now they'll have time to do more cool stuff instead of always catching up with the other ones.
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Actually, if Opera is Google's bitch now, it's less so than ever. Opera is getting more and more revenue from other sources than Google, and is probably more independent from Google financially than ever before.
How are they depending on Google for the browser? They are basically letting Google do the ground work, and doing the easy and fun part on top of that. Seems like a win-win situation to Opera.
How do you know that the UI will just be "slightly different"?
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Actually, Opera did tabs right. They had proper MDI, while Firefox just had inflexible tabs. Opera didn't copy Firefox. They just changed the way they did MDI, but it was still proper MDI.
Opera also did proper popup blocking befire Firefox came around and copied it.
Opera also did proper fit to width, while Firefox didn't have anything like that. And yes, they did do the zoom and fit to width methods you see on phones today. They did it with the Wii browser, which came out before the iPhone, and they did it with Opera Mini.
So as you can see, your version of history is false.
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My fault. I still have troubles in considering Trident a serious contender when talking about rendering engines and standard compliance in the same sentence.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
"Nuh uh" is not a rebuttal... I was there through the years, trying to use Opera. It sucked, for all the reasons I listed.
If I was wrong, Opera would have a vastly larger user-base today, instead of being a tiny also-ran.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You are not a god who represents everyone else. Your opinions are not global. Your opinions are yours. I explained how I think your opinions are false. I pointed out that Opera actually did MDI right.
Also, Opera is not tiny. It has more than 300 million users, and is quite big in parts of the world. It's always been one of the top 2 or 3 browsers in Russia and former USSR states, for example.
What's been holding Opera back is that it's been ignored and blocked by sites, causing stuff to break. This makes it harder to retain users.
But it did retain tens of millions of users because of the excellent usability features, such as tabbed browsing done right.
Clever signature text goes here.
No, you asserted that Opera did tabs correctly. Your opinion on the subject has no more weight than mine. Meanwhile, you completely discounted, and failed to explain away the FACT that Opera later directly copied Firefox's tab model (while keeping its old tab method as an option). You also failed to explain why opera's stupid method of cycling tabs in historical order is any better than letting the window manager do it, or how having multiple browser windows tiled inside of the larger Opera window, is EVER a good feature, for ANYONE, in ANY situation, and disallowing multiple full browser windows.
You're free to hold your own opinions, of course. But disagreeing with me, asserting I'm wrong and your opposing opinion is right, without bothering to factually refute ANY of the points I made, just makes you a whiny child crying "nuh uh" over and over again, and nothing more.
Since you don't seem to have the wherewithal to even hold a coherent discussion, I will try to remember to ignore you in the future.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Actually, you made the assertion. I merely contradicted your assertion.
Opera never copied Firefox's tab model. It added an option between behaving the standard MDI way, or behaving the way other tabbed browsers did. Of course, later they merged the two, giving people the best of both worlds. Firefox copied other tabbed browsers.
You are just trolling about Opera, so I decided to set the record straight.
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The search box allows use of the option to disable reuse of the same window, which allows searches to open in a new window. So it does provide extra functionality, and I have found nothing useful to take up the space that would be freed by the search bar. Always open to ideas for such though.
Ah, that's too bad. I had never used the option.