
Opera will use Blink - mathias
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/
======
mikevm
I used to use Opera for many years, and IMHO it was almost always the best
browser around feature and speed-wise. The only thing holding it back was the
rendering engine.

I ended up making the switch to Chrome when Opera 12 came out and was too
buggy for my taste (it was the last straw). It took a while to make Chrome
feel Opera-ish, but I still miss Opera from time to time, you know, because of
the little things.

One thing I wish Chrome had is the ability to select hyperlinks. Opera would
let you click and hold the mouse cursor anywhere on a hyperlinked text and
select it. If you try the same in Chrome, it will try to drag & drop the link
instead of starting a selection. In fact, sometimes it gets really tricky to
try to select hyperlinked text.

~~~
relix
You might already know this, but Chrome automatically selects hyperlinked text
when you right-click it. You're not able to select a part of it, but if you
want to copy just the text, all of it, you can right-click any link, and then
choose "Copy", right under "Copy link address".

------
grinich
_Vendor prefixes were like Morrissey’s solo career: on paper, a good idea –
but in reality, a horrible mess._

Best line of that blog post :)

~~~
pclark
It's a ridiculous example of "good on paper, not in reality."

All of his albums are good or better, almost all the albums sold well – and
the more recent ones like You Are the Quarry are superb. Oh, and he's great to
see live solo.

How about almost any rock band reforming? A great idea on paper and almost
always a terrible idea. Smashing Pumpkins?

(How about _the Euro_ if you want a good example?)

~~~
eru
The Euro was a mistake on paper. It held out pretty well in the first few
years compared to that.

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mortenjorck
This is quickly turning into the tech version of Game of Thrones.

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mortalkastor
I, somehow, missed the news about the new Blink rendering engine and thought
this was about Opera supporting the <blink> tag. Phew.

~~~
yohui
So, by moving to Blink, Opera loses <blink>.

I guess those nostalgic for the 90s shall have to rely on Firefox, inheritor
of Netscape's mantle.

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mikec3k
Opera's rendering was never the worst thing about it. The thing I always hated
about it was its clunky bizarre UI.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Funny, its UI was always my #1 reason for using it. MDI + ability to
completely hide tabs and Ctrl-Tab through them + Vim keybind scheme = fast
workflow and maximized screen real estate.

Even to this day no other browser can match it, though Chrome/ium with a Vim
plugin comes close.

~~~
adimitrov
Erhm, have you tried vimperator/pentadactyl? You know, one of the projects
that _started_ this whole "let's bake Vim into the browser"-craze? (They
didn't exactly start it, I think, but they sure made it popular.) I can
distinctly remember a couple of years ago when I switched _from_ Opera to
Firefox precisely because of Vimperator, because it was impossible to
replicate the experience fully within Opera. It is still impossible today:
Pentadactyl (Vimperator's successor) is much more fully-featured than anything
you can do in any other browser, because of Firefox' approach to plugins.

~~~
claudius
You can bind any action to any key you like in Opera, how did you fail to
implement a vim-like keybinding scheme then?

~~~
adimitrov
It's not the binds. It's all of it, including stuff like buffer lists,
programmability, marks (marks are _so_ _bloody_ important to me when reading
long web pages. I'm seriously, seriously angered by the fact that PDF readers
don't have them, and I might, one of these days, scratch my own itch and go
hack them into evince or so.)

Opera doesn't even have a concept of marks. Never mind marks across browser
windows, tabs, or even pages you don't have open. Also, I love the
minimalistic interface: you only see a small status bar, and (optionally) a
tab bar. You can even hide everything. You can't do that with Opera (at all.)

------
zbowling
Everyone is picking their sides in this battle it seems.

I wonder what chrome for iOS is going to use (given that it's more just a
wrapper around UIWebView with some chrome like features).

~~~
gluxon
Chrome for iOS will be forced to use WebKit as its rendering engine due to
Apple's strict policies.

------
gcb0
what will decide Opera fates is it's monetization strategy.

for browsers, that's the biggest difference (after quality of product)

Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-
referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.

if opera also monetize by selling the user, it will have no chance. at all. On
the other hand, selling software or showing ads are also not viable. So i'm
very curious to what they are going to do.

btw, what is the current business model of opera to begin with?! do they live
only on licensing opera mobile for phone manufacturers?

Edit: the answer for the question at the end is Yes.
[http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-
ope...](http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-opera-make-
money-aka-our-most-asked-question-ever)

~~~
atesti
>Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-
referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.

Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read more about it!

~~~
gcb0
search for stackexchange questions on how to change/disable referrer on
chrome. you will see several accepted answers of things that do not work
anymore. just be sure to search for some years ago.

from top of my mind, the command line option. the chorme:network-setting(sic)
thing. the compile option flag

also, everytime i mention it people ask for source (on this forum where hardly
there's time for any discussion!) and once i collected all the commits, but
it's on my hell-banned account @gcb. feel free to dig that comment out if you
like.

------
mmahemoff
My heart sank a little for Opera on reading this news; so it's good to know
Opera was in on the secret. If not when they made the decision to adopt
WebKit, then at least some point before the Blink news dropped.

------
revelation
_“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink,
ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in
existing code.”_

 _“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to WebKit,
ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in
existing code.”_

 _“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Gecko,
ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in
existing code.”_

Funny how adaptable these are. If you can't decide, just abstract away.

~~~
illicium
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

~~~
camus
cant beat the system ? go with the flow.

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laumars
As a long time Opera user, I'm really looking forward to their switch.

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stock_toaster
Does this mean that Opera wont get sandboxing and "tab isolation"?

My understanding was one of the reasons Google forked as to rip out the
webkit2 versions of those things, in favor of their own, which are fairly
tightly tied to Chrome.

So either Opera is going to be more "chromey" or...they are going to
reimplement those parts? Maybe they already have them (I am not that familiar
with Opera these days)?

~~~
mtgx
If something is in Chromium, it will be in Opera. It's as simple as that. And
Chromium has tab isolation.

~~~
stock_toaster
You didn't really answer _any_ of my questions. (EDIT: I guess you did
actually answer the first one. Thanks.) You certainly aren't required to, but
still.. did you only read the first sentence I wrote?

~~~
samwillis
Opera have said from the beginning that they are dropping Presto and switching
to the chromium toolkit. New Opera is effectively a thick skin on top of
Chromium. The world miss reported it as them switching to WebKit, which is
true but not the layer they are taking it at. It's no surprise that they are
following google with Blink.

~~~
stock_toaster
Ah. Thanks for the clarification!

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aj700
So this is a fork of webkit? Does Safari get stuck with some incompatible
because different engine? Apple can/will join blink too? How will it display
the >blink< taglement? It's like Google are saying, "thanks for all the stuff
you did on khtml, now we'll take it from here bub."

------
abcd_f
Looks like Opera is lining itself up for a little acquisition.

~~~
qompiler
More like obsoletion by not differentiating and competing against Google's
spyware browser chrome. Instead they opt for a weak and lazy approach, it's
just a matter of time now.

