Slashdot Mirror
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."
Because it is LOL to fool with the rendering engine.
LOL this looks great in IE7, looks like crap in IE8, doesn't work at all in IE9, and looks great in IE10. Why not extend that type functionality to all browsers?
LOL LOL LOL
They are keeping legacy -webkit prefixes and are not adding any new prefixes. Please see here
Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
New versions of IE 10+ are fairly compliant, in some ways more so than others. IE11 will be blocking scripts that are IE specific if I'm not mistaken to keep developers from making their sites look different on IE than say Chrome because older versions of IE weren't compliant when now IE11 is...but the user still suffers from the past IE sins.
Remember: Don't Blink
Google says they're forking for technical reasons -- Google uses a different thread model and security model than Apple and making a hard break makes for easier maintenance. If they're going to keep both rendering engines around and updated then there would be no reason to fork in the first place.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Until they decide to discontinue supporting them. Google is fickle.
I hope they don't keep -webkit-* enabled forever. The CSSWG agreement doesn't say anything about phasing out existing prefixed properties, but keeping them around with outdated syntax/behavior doesn't seem like a good idea. It was never good practice to use a prefixed property without its unprefixed version. So if removing prefixed properties breaks some pages, that means they were broken in the first place.
You must be new here :-)
Things stay freaking forever in the industry once it someone or a corporation is dependent on something. IE 6 and XP is still being used with its users considering an open standard broken because it breaks and broken standard to them which is open. Logic is backwards but CMS never get replaced, sites stay, and users whine and blame YOU if something doesn't work. Never the product.
This is a classic lesson on why standards are so important and why going proprietary is bad. Not a closed vs open debate more than a standard one. Stuff never goes away even if it is broken.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
assuming they're 100% compatible
The fact that this is a massive assumption once the codebases start diverging was the point of the GP post.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
So? It's fully open source.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Strange, I thought Bing was the default search engine.
Blink is based on webkit which itself is based on KHTML which is as you might know is fully open source (GPL). :)
They can't really change that license
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
I have just been digging around and think I can answer this question. It seems that the reason for this is to do with the upcoming webkit2 Apple project taking a very different approach to how multiprocess stuff should work. They have some pretty diagrams here showing the differences: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
Google have long taken the approach it seems to just have entirely separate processes for each page talk to a webkit subprocess via api calls.The webkit2 project are taking a different approach by trying to put multiprocess stuff actually into the webkit2 api itself.
Since Apple will probably throw webkit out the window anyway when webkit2 is ready it seems that everyone moaning about Google here may be a bit backward. It seems that when Webkit2 is ready then everyone except Chromium will use it. Chromium won't need to use webkit2 because it is already designed to do what webkit2 does anyway.
I have to admit, I have a gut feeling here that wrapping the multiprocess stuff around webkit ala chromium is actually a better idea than trying to do what WebKit2 is trying so I think the chromium devs might be making a better choice from a technical perspective even though it probably is a bit more resource hungry.
Of course much of this about Apple adopting webkit2 for Safari all pure speculation, but then it has to be when you are talking about a closed source product like Safari and don't work for Apple.
I dont read
Google says they're forking for technical reasons -- Google uses a different thread model and security model than Apple and making a hard break makes for easier maintenance.
That's only half of the story - they're using a different thread model because they wrote it themselves and didn't allow Apple to merge it into the original code base. So the fork is not really based on a technical reason.
KHTML is LGPL, not GPL. While any modifications to the KHTML parts have to be open sourced, anything else linked to that can be under any license Apple, Google, Opera, or anyone else wants. If KHTML was actually under GPL, then while IANAL I am pretty sure that any proprietary code used in Safari, Chrome (not Chromium), or Opera (once it finishes switching from Presto) would be considered GPL violations. In addition releasing parts of Webkit/Blink under BSD (which is the case) would probably violate the GPL.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Standards keep the various vendor's implementations compliant.
Laws prevent crimes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
before pensioning off Presto...