
Opera moves to WebKit - bdash
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2013/02/13/webkit
======
jasonkester
Smart move.

I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped
worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and
that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and
haven't been for a long time.

... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went
out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser.
For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if
you supported that you supported Opera.

Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying
Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box"
rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this
time around.

They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six
people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will
probably render fine on it.

 _EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This
comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten
minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course
the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for)._

~~~
rplnt
You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share.
There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard..
sometimes for their own bad.

Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from
Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time?

As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your
market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain
markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East
from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely
expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west
switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but
managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring
billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big
contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary
factor).

ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your
comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.

~~~
jahewson
> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

~~~
rplnt
As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5%
(10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010
as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech
Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of
google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,;
was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well
established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.

~~~
c1u
Those are all immature web markets. By the time the majority of web users in
those countries spend a significant amount of money online, they probably wont
be using Opera anymore. If you're looking for more file-sharing users, sure,
target these markets. But if you want to make money today then don't waste
your time. (I've lived in, started/run businesses, and produced web products
in Eastern Europe).

~~~
Herald_MJ
The European mobile web market is 'immature'. #shithnsays

~~~
c1u
Not what I meant at all. I just meant that in my experience, the counties
listed have relatively low median disposable incomes, and are generally not
inclined to pay for web products.

~~~
prumek
Have you ever heard about ads?

------
lordlarm
I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the
last couple of years.

Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that
Opera is a small, very small, company.

I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve
their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other
browsers.

A big loss for the general state of rendering platforms though, with now only
Webkit, Trident and Gecko as serious contenders.

~~~
pkorzeniewski
I don't think it's a loss, I wouldn't mind if every browser switched to
Webkit. Problems with cross-browser rendering differences would be gone, all
browsers would use the same newest technologies and the engine would evolve
much faster.

~~~
bzbarsky
Doing this would mean being forever stuck in single-threaded land for
rendering (e.g. nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could ever happen).

People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much
code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's
just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact.

So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores,
by all means try to get them to all switch to WebKit.

~~~
mikaelj
Are you implying Presto is multi-threaded?

~~~
bzbarsky
No (though it will in fact do layout in parallel with JS execution by time-
slicing its JS, last I checked, unlike other UAs).

My point is that it's bad if all browsers switch to WebKit and web sites
absolutely require WebKit to work correctly, which is what the parent of my
comment was suggesting should happen. This point is somewhat independent of
what happens with Presto per se.

------
andybak
Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The
cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the
advantages it brought were slender.

It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit.

On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering
engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to
define standards as 'whatever webkit does'.

~~~
panacea
Is a monoculture as bad as it might seem though? Front end web development is
a clusterfuck. Webkit is open source, unlike the almost monoculture that ie6
represented. It can be forked and evolution can continue. Ditch -webkit -mos
and -o. Like when the dinosaurs experienced a mass extinction event and
mammals bloomed from a shrew into cats and humans.

~~~
gcp
_It can be forked and evolution can continue._

Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like
trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes
at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the
dinosaurs anyway.

~~~
coldtea
> _Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates._

Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished.

This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than
Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team).

Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution,
it's life in "life support".

~~~
gcp
_Some species DO get extinguished._

Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather
than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

 _If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER
than Webkit engine_

Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no
standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever
WebKit does".

A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any
renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own
engine sucked.

This is stopping evolution, not helping it.

~~~
coldtea
> _Some species DO get extinguished.

>>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future,
rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run._

I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an
analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were
simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future".

> _Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is
> no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do
> "whatever WebKit does"._

We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other
from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact.

Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then
you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec
should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined
spec is hardly "evolutionary".

> _A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any
> renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own
> engine sucked._

Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever
dragging behind the other engines.

~~~
gcp
_I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an
analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were
simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future"._

Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as
opposed to the global one).

 _Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards --
then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec
should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined
spec is hardly "evolutionary"._

You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear.
Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and
if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try
to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the
prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some
complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a
contributing factor to Opera's decision.

Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same
features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to
standardize the API, which precludes future competition.

The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a
spec.

------
kmfrk
As someone who has used Opera for over ten years - probably 15 - and still
does, Opera has become an awful browser over the last year or so.

Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature
solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser
with native tab stacking.

It _also_ used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active
tabs (hell, the only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent
syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is
sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs
so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome).

There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something
like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop
and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the
biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web
browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks
locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am
not in a rush to switch.

Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts,
and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still _huge_.

Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining
its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more
than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are
sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now.

I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of
working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it
for for over a decade.

And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.

~~~
5h
Not that I disagree with your post, especially the rel="next" part, but I
wonder what the problem with syncing is when using chrome & signed into a
google account? ... it does the job well for me over 4 or so devices.

~~~
kmfrk
It switches between not pushing the syncing at all (I never managed to get
bookmark sync working on iOS) and garbling my bookmarks in all sorts of folder
and file tree permutations.

It's entirely possible that I have lost bookmarks to this, but I wouldn't know
from the utter clusterfuck of it all.

Speaking of rel="next", it is an incredibly sad state of affairs that sites
such as Daring Fireball can't even be bothered to use it, just because other
browsers aren't using what is so obviously a treasure to web browsing. Opera
even wanted to use this for swipe left-right navigation on touch-based devices
as evidenced in a presentation years old now.

------
eekee
There's one thing I can't stand in many of these comments: The blithe
assumption that just because something is open-source, it -- and any fork of
it -- could be maintained. I can't emphasise enough how wrong this is.

Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every
worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between
Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the
packages play nicely with each other.

Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as
complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous
amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by _many_ people, each of
which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth
supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very
hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which
attract much help may be of very poor quality.

------
drinchev
As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm
a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding
a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera
browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code
exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will
start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain
untouched for years.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-
misu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misused-
feature-overflowhidden-weirdness/14773817#14773817)

~~~
Arelius
Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of
software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while
everyone else in the office uses chrome.

~~~
drinchev
Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first
task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is
everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think __bad
developers __will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-
webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from
amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there will be more and more webkit-
optimized content. That's sad!

~~~
bzbarsky
It's not just amateurs.

The "mobile" sites out there are overwhelmingly WebKit-only. We're talking
sites from Google, Disney, Apple, various news sites, etc, not sites done by
amateurs.

And they're not accidentally WebKit-only in many cases, but deliberately so.

------
dgesang
After reading some comments here I come to the conclusion that (too) many web
developers are just a bunch of opportunistic ignorant hypocrites. On the one
hand they repeatedly state that constantly expanding variety of HTML9
technologies[1] is _THE best thing that could have ever happen to the
Internet_ and that there is _nothing worse than mono culture_. On the other
hand they do not seem to be willing to even consider testing their web _apps_
with a browser with a market share below 10%, because it's just not that
important, and embrace the overall greatness of Chrome/Webkit and that it
should be _the only browser we should develop for/with_.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211>

~~~
crazygringo
Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions,
not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group
hold contradictory opinions.

But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can
also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example,
expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for _exploring, prototyping,
experimenting_ , where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only
>10%-share browsers can be worth _commercially developing for_ , because of
resource constraints.

In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and
experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual
final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice,
but you can see how they're just different perspectives.

~~~
dgesang

        While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for
    

That's one problem: many web developers program for _browsers_ , not
_standards_.

    
    
        In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation,
        that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards.
    

Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone
agrees/complies to one technology and by doing so it becomes a de facto
standard. Then new approaches for new problems can be taken from there,
without reinventing the wheel. But this also creates room for alternatives to
rise, so we are back to multiculturism. :)

E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative.
Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)

~~~
mikaelj
You seriously underestimate the development time it takes to pull off such a
thing.

------
bdash
In an email to the WebKit development mailing list[1] Håkon Wium Lie, the
Opera CTO, mentioned that they've had engineers working on WebKit for a while
now, and they'll soon be contributing their work on multi-column layout to the
WebKit project.

[1]: [https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-February/...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-February/023820.html)

~~~
bdash
And their first contribution is already attached to
<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553>!

------
spicyj
And then there were three.

Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new
popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

~~~
kibwen
High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to
challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but
it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be.

[1] <https://github.com/mozilla/servo>

[2] <http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2>

~~~
bdash
WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has
been used by Safari since v5.1.

~~~
kibwen
Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript,
HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that
conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how
you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

~~~
gcp
Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine
is different.

~~~
khuey
Firefox for Android no longer does this, and hasn't since the "Native Fennec"
launch.

~~~
kbrosnan
You two should hug this out in #mobile.

------
acqq
Opera users were bullied by Google for years. Even when some Google's site
would work perfectly in Opera when the Opera would identify itself as IE or
Firefox, Google would sometimes even reject user's attempt to access some of
their sites. To the users of Opera, it was obvious that it was done
intentionally -- on Google scale, they were bullying up to 300 million users
who mostly selected Opera exactly because it runs _better_ on the less CPU-
powerful hardware.

I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor
for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS
screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8> Opera was my savior through the
years.

------
andrewl-hn
Opera value preposition was in that they provided a complete solution
(rendering engine, network stack, filesystem integration, security,
customizable UI, etc.) People and companies often picked up WebKit for their
hardware platform without realizing how much stuff is there besides the
renderer itself. As a result, they had to spend more time on porting the rest
of the stack and were late to market. That's, for example, what happened to
Nokia with Symbian Webkit and their clone of Mini.

Opera provided SDK and offered custom development services around their
platform for a good price. Honestly, I don't think that their business model
would suffer much because of the switch.

The primary benefit of Presto are very modest hardware requirements. It can
run on almost every hardware platform (even something that doesn't have a
proper port of Linux core and GCC). That used to be pretty important in 1999,
in 2005 and even in 2009, but in recent years it gets a lot cheaper to grab a
good enough ARM core for your device, slap either a small Linux kernel, or
even Android on top of it; rather than having a dedicated team of engineers
struggling with something that barely runs an odd build of Watcom C compiler.

Opera was always moving against the mainstream. They optimized for worst
hardware while it was getting better. They optimized for limited bandwidth
with Mini while network speeds were rapidly increasing. They optimized for
memory consumption with Futhark while Mozilla and Google were busy breaking
JavaScript speed records.

None of that were bad moves per se, but this company is very different from
its competitors. Maybe that's the main reason why it survived and has been
moderately successful during all these years.

As a result, their userbase also moved over time. They got popular in Easter
Europe in late 90s, moved to South East Asia and South America in the middle
of 00th, and now are very popular in Africa. They used to be pretty big on
desktop, then moved to mobile, and now to embedded and devices market.

I remember seeing a number of blog posts where web developers dismissed the
importance of Opera, saying that only Russians and people from Africa are
using it and they are not the ones who click on ads and make purchases.
Wbedevs criticized poor developer tools, poor graphic performance, weird bugs.
Google always tried to persuade Opera users to switch
([http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-
th...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-the-open-
web)), Yahoo pulled it from their Grade Browser Support
(<http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/>), John Resig's
slide got picked up by masses (<http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png>).

One thing where Opera shines is a UI innovations. When Chome was released I
counted about 30 big and small things that they wisely borrowed from Opera UI.
That was almost five years ago and Opera was moving fast, too. Mouse gestures,
broad customizability, passionate users and some of the greatest people
working in the company. I'm pretty certain that Opera's future is bright and
shiny!

\---- Former Opera employee and devoted user, speaking for myself, obviously.

~~~
adamsmith
This is a really cool comment. Is there anywhere I can read more about the UI
innovations Chrome took from Opera (or web browser UI innovations in general)?

~~~
prumek
Opera borrowed Opera's Speed Dial, they placed the tabs at the top (above the
address bar) like Opera did (and people kept bashing it for that), etc.

------
nkuttler
"Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even
easier to choose Opera in the future."

That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!

~~~
szalansky
Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you,
because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a
different UI of the browser.

And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and
Safari's.

~~~
rplnt
Its ability to configure basically anything from user interface is far above
any other browser. Chrome is a browser that I recommend to parents. It has
dumbed down interface, zero options - perfect for average majority. It is
still powerful when combined with dozens of extensions, but it still can't
compete with Opera in this area.

It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.

~~~
lucian1900
I like Chrome's UI. There's almost nothing it doesn't do that I'd want. I
could totally do without extensions if I had to, but they are nice to have.

------
rurounijones
Is there any talk of open-sourcing the presto engine?

Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the
code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of
how it was done" archiving.

It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary
obscurity

------
networked
Their move is understandable, but it'll be something of a pity if this affects
Opera's performance. From personal experience I can say that Opera is pretty
much the only current browser that can deliver a combination of acceptable
speed and rendering quality on really outdated x86 hardware.

I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM
running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped
laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way
more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera
switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it
would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that
big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't
going to be the only ones affected.

Edit: rephrased for clarity.

------
wooptoo
While I agree that webkit is a great piece of software, what happens when
everybody switches to webkit? Will Google/Apple/developers simply ignore other
engines and let it become the new IE of the decade?

------
szalansky
At last. Opera used to be my favorite browser, thanks to their sophisticated
UI. But I gave it up when HTML5 started coming in. I believe it had problems
with Javascripts too.

Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users
using it and being happy.

~~~
pornel
The great irony is that Opera has started the HTML5 effort:

<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/>

back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.

------
DanBC
This thread feels like people didn't learn from all the best viewed in
netscape or best viewed in IE terrible sites from early 2000s.

[BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.

------
jimsteinhart
In contrast to what developers might think, this is bad for the Open Web which
is based on several competing and thriving implementations.

------
micheljansen
Wow, that's a huge step. Being the #4 rendering engine was really hurting
Opera though. Most people use WebKit or Gecko during development and then make
it work in IE as well, but never get to Opera. One of the main reasons I
stopped using Opera for browsing was that, despite having some great features
(always loved their gestures), so many sites just didn't work properly.

I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as
they have always done.

------
rimantas
To all who want to compare webkit being dominant with IE: don't. IE was closed
source, and most important of all: it was not developed for a long time after
IE6. WebKit development is very active, there are several companies involved
and there is still a lot of work they are willing to do in bringing it
forward.

~~~
furyofantares
Yeah, as I remember IE6 was actually a pretty good browser when it came out. I
believe the real problem was it didn't get updated often enough, and even when
it did get updated you couldn't count on users to take the updates, so we got
stuck with it for years when everything else was making progress. WebKit gets
updated all the time and at least on the desktop you can count on users to get
updates to their browsers pretty quickly.

------
ed_blackburn
Here's a scenario: _As a network provider I wish to subsidise the hardware on
my tariffs further still. I can shape traffic, sell advertising and analytic's
to achieve this. Now if only I could get a capable proxy service compatible
with the common browsers on iOS and Android._

Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them
from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that
they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser.

I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client
ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many
advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising
down our throats _cough_ _cough_ Facebook and Google.

------
pestaa
WebKit was the reason why I started using other browsers -- I'm very excited
to see it in Opera!

I wonder what'll happen to Dragonfly, their integrated development platform?
It was a neat project, although arguably inferior to Firebug/Chrome Dev Tools
in many areas.

Good luck Opera!

~~~
mcrittenden
I was wondering that too. I assume Dragonfly will die and they will switch to
WebKit/Chromium's dev tools instead. If that happens, I very much hope that
they will rebuild Dragonfly's unique bits for WebKit's dev tools and submit
them as patches, so nothing of value is lost.

------
dschiptsov
This is how it works - open source quality created by enthusiastic community
wins proprietary crap produced by wage coders counting hours and lines of
code.

This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP,
even AAPL) will look like.

~~~
josephagoss
Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers
behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.

~~~
dschiptsov
This is complicated. Google tries to create (or emulate) something like
community of individual engineers which rests on principles like "do no evil"
or whatever. An order of some kind. It works. So, we could say that
contributions are of individuals, not of Google. Even if contributors get paid
for full-time, it is their own intention in the first place. At least it is
what they want things to look like.

As for Apple, there are probably just programmers on a payroll. Apple has a
different culture. It is a Steve's workshop, where they "invent" things, or
whatever they think these days.

------
viseztrance
Great news for Opera. Unfortunately this is another reason for developers to
ignore other browsers and use proprietary webkit prefixes.

~~~
Arelius
I'd generally agree. But my impression is that Opera had small enough market
share that people overwhelmingly ignored it anyways.

------
tomelders
I'll admit to being ignorant of Opera for far too long, and only really
considering it by including an -o- variant in my css vendor prefixes.

But (rightly or wrongly) this news does mean I'll give Opera some serious
consideration. If it's Webkit, I can use it with confidence and if Opera's
developer tools are better than Chrome or Safari, then it will become my
browser of choice.

I doubt I'm the only person thinking this way. So that's one more reason this
could be a great move for Opera.

------
runn1ng
I see this as a win for open source software. (Or "free software". I never
know.)

Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of
sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could
come, fork it and make it better.

Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the
market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.

~~~
dylan-m
I totally agree with you here, but I just need to correct you on something.
Webkit is based on KHTML, which was available with the LGPL license. Of
course, it's much more Webkit than KHTML at this point, but it isn't so much
that Apple shared the Webkit code as they wisely forked a mature open source
project and followed its license ;)

------
EGreg
A win for web developers, in my humble opinion, as the rendering engines
converge. With open source projects like WebKit, why do we need so many
proprietary engines competing with each other? It creates more target
environments for all the web developers and designers around the world to
repetitively test.

This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat
proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition
between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections
they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the
amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of
interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple
platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar
targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from
others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.

------
neya
From a designer's perspective -

I used to be a hardcore Opera user (as a regular consumer) till Opera 10,
mainly because of the beautiful inbuilt download manager and the smoothness of
their usability.

However, for professional work and testing - The only three browsers I use for
testing these days are Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+.

I never used to consider Opera because, for MY website, the traffic from opera
would be really negligible to make it worth the effort getting something right
on their browser, though Opera would 99% of the times be almost as perfect as
chrome, unlike IE.

Now, this move only makes designers' lives easier, needless to say. I'm just
waiting for the day when Microsoft would put down their pride of using a
stinky, inconsistent rendering engine and move to Webkit, just like Opera and
that day would be the start of a new era - Where designers can focus on
getting their designs right, than focusing on _how to_ get them right on
various browsers.

Cheers Opera, Great move!

------
wluu
Interesting... I wonder if they'd now consider opening up their browser engine
as an open source project?

Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could
fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually
happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...

------
Dylanlacey
We already had a monoculture; Opera not using Webkit wasn't preventing this
because as you can see in the comments in this page, most non-Opera users
considered its existence silly and never catered for it.

I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996).
But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth
developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the
monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got _tired_
of it.

And I think they are tired. They're talking about _finally_ impacting the
future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as
a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as
awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing
them to do that.

------
DigitalSea
I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven
itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible
for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face
it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception
of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best
engines out there, period.

That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in
many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited
bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you
have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".

~~~
msoad
WebKit is not a "browser engine".

~~~
DigitalSea
Layout engine, browser engine. Same thing to me. No need to nitpick.

------
Aissen
Three weeks ago, they let clues out:

[http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-
webkit-b...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-
browser)

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-
ne...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-new-webkit-
based-ice-mobile-browser)

(those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother
linking)

------
lazyjones
That's going to make them less competitive in my opinion, although it's an
understandable move considering their size. I am wondering about the timing
though - now that HTML5 is finally a standard and browser developers can
stabilize their rendering instead of playing catch-up with the latest draft
features, it's a bit late to switch. They would have benefited more by
switching 2-3 years ago.

------
ishansharma
Great.

Opera was my primary browser before Google Chrome. I tried sticking to it but
it was always left behind. Then as I dived into Google's services more and
more, it was clear that Opera wasn't a consideration for Google.

Want to Drag and Drop something in GMail, not possible! Any other cool
features on many other websites, no!

Now that they are switching to Webkit, I hope Opera gets support for all these
features.

------
blaabjerg
Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how
much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years.

This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and
spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer
feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once
again!

------
nevster
Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number?

Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>, if all 7 billion
people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million
people.

------
sergiotapia
Dragonfly is in my opinion better than Webkits inspector. I love using it.

Does anyone know what will happen to Dragonfly after the switch?

~~~
iopq
Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite
it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.

------
dave1010uk
I'd like to know what the pros and cons of Opera switching to WebKit instead
of Gecko are. Was Gecko ever a possibility?

~~~
d4n3
Opera makes most of its revenue on mobile, and these days, mobile web =
webkit.

I don't think gecko was ever a serious choice for them.

------
gl0wa
Now it's time for IE to switch to WebKit as well. Also, they should make it
available for all versions of Windows.

~~~
yuhong
Well, it's MSHTML rendering engine is used by many other apps too, for one
thing.

------
halo
Apple and Google managed to do what Microsoft never could and make it
unprofitable to create a commercial web browser.

A sad day.

------
ehamberg
<https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304>:

 _New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera
adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents._

~~~
dylan-m
My new hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts that act like prefixed CSS
styles are healthy standards that must be conformed to, and finding -o and
-webkit prefixes without -dylans-browser equivalents.

Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to
include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the
syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the
style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that
standard.

There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement
nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in
mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be
closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without
testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't
using them at all.

------
ErikAugust
This is a major change in Belarus!
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-
is...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is-belarus-
the-only-country-where-opera-is-the-most-popular-browser/265406/)

------
_pmf_
Welcome monoculture.

It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.

~~~
supercoder
IE and Firefox still exist.

~~~
bzbarsky
IE does not exist on mobile (though they're trying).

Firefox is working on it, but it's an uphill battle.

"mobile" sites are overwhelmingly coded to be WebKit-only.

------
glennos
Sounds like great news. Hopefully those extra resources can go into returning
the GUI to the best in the business and at that point, I look forward to
returning. In the meantime, Chrome will keep me warm.

------
homosaur
Is there any benefit to still having multiple rendering engines out there?
Should IE move to webkit? Firefox? Should prefixes now be -ms-webkit and
-opera-webkit so browser makers can still innovate?

------
marizmelo
It was about time. Webkit is becoming the de facto browser engine. People will
say that this kills competition, but competition is just good when brings
better alternatives, Opera is not the case.

------
jbrooksuk
I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen
interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a
far superior job in regards to standards.

------
g8oz
As someone who has been using Opera since the 90's, this makes me sad.

------
CrankyBear
Here's the real link: [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-
move-to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-
webkit)

------
meerita
As I stated on the other thread: It's a wise move for Opera. Now they can hire
webkit-engineers from anywere without heavy training on their own private
model.

------
United857
If they are using WebKit, Chromium, and V8 -- what areas can they add
uniqueness to so that it's not just a Opera-branded version of Chrome?

------
octix
It's always good to have choices, however I still cannot understand the
advantages of Opera over it's open source siblings...

------
afshinmeh
Seems a great news but I can't really understand the benefits and differents
between Gecko and Webkit, can someone say?

~~~
qznc
For the normal user it does not matter.

It just matters that there are competing engines. As long as there are
multiple implementations, we will have a formal standard for HTML and Co. If
e.g. everybody (Microsoft,Mozilla) would adopt WebKit, then nobody would
bother to extend the HTML standard. Just implement it in WebKit. Soon, HTML
will be a mess like Office Open XML.

------
hnriot
I drive past opera software every morning, if it wasn't for the sign on their
building I'd never think about them. They were popular a long while back, but
now? Does anyone still use opera. If so why? It was behind in tech and for any
serious web development it didn't matter, chrome, Firefox were the two that
get used. Safari obviously but mainly for iOS platforms.

The number of comments here surprises me, I would have thought this irrelevant
news.

------
grandpoobah
Does this mean they'll be using V8 too?

~~~
szalansky
I'm curious too! I think Javascript in Opera was a bigger problem than HTML.

A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told
that they can't make it work properly on Opera.

~~~
zobzu
Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML
layout engine was/is pretty much fine.

~~~
bdash
At [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-
to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit)
they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to
maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine
was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems
encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation
in general. A smaller portion are in the binding between the DOM
implementation and the JavaScript language, and fewer still are in the
JavaScript engine itself.

~~~
zobzu
I tend to believe my own opinions rather than press releases :)

I'm sort of including dom<>js relations as part of the js problem tho.

------
snarfy
Are they going to open source Presto?

------
spleeder
This is great news!

I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering
engine.

------
itsbits
I hope Firefox and IE do the same..Atleast in HTML5 we have common engine...

------
rdl
Now we just have to wait for Firefox to adopt WebKit, and...Lynx?

------
jamese
Now if only Microsoft would do the same with Internet Explorer!

------
SirPulse
Does this not create a webkit monoculture? Find a security flaw in website and
suddenly two thirds of browsers are vulnerable.

------
chimpoo
makes sense

------
daGrevis
All I can say is "Woohoo!".

------
ponyous
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR TOO LONG. Sorry but I literary have screamed
in front of pc.

------
astrojoy
Question: Where are the HN moderators? They are quick to hellban users but
allow Opera to get the top 3 positions on HN's front page?

Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission-
critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances
and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways.

This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser
without me actually doing it. That's when I could no longer even allow it to
be installed on my system.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I had to share this in case anyone wants a
different perspective.

~~~
rospaya
I agree.

We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what
mods are for.

