Opera switches to WebKit

Officially announced, Opera is switching from their own rendering engine, Presto, to WebKit.

:frowning:

[font=verdana]While itā€™s disappointing to see an independent being swallowed up by a megalith, I donā€™t know that Iā€™m devastated. Whatā€™s more disappointing is that so few people use Opera in the first place, despite it being far and away the best browser out there.

For me, the main reasons to use Opera are (i) standards compliance, (ii) speed, (iii) ability to run on any OS (although sadly not on Windows Mobile :bawling:), and most importantly (iv) its vast and mind-boggling array of useful features that is squillions of times better than everything that IE, Chrome, Firefox and the top 100 Firefox extensions have all put together.

As long as I can continue to run the latest version happily on WinXP, it doesnā€™t sacrifice its speed and responsiveness, and the feature list remains as long as a very long thing, Iā€™m not sure itā€™s going to be a bad thing. It will mean that websites that have only been optimised for -webkit- users will now be fully functional in Opera, and hopefully it will give the company the stability and security to continue, which was always going to be a challenge when they were using their own rendering engine.[/font]

A sort of eulogy from ā€œchaalsā€ (Charles McCathieNevile): http://my.opera.com/chaals/blog/2013/02/14/another-chapter-of-a-long-goodbye

He starts off about the people working at the company, then the stuff Opera had pioneerd, and lastly the effect on teh web world.

I think it gets interesting from here: ā€œOpera also built things everyone copied.ā€

There is now a petition for Opera to open-source the Presto engine which needs 48 thousand signatures :stuck_out_tongue:

Iā€™d love to see this go open source, I think a lot of good could come out of it.

Can some one tell me what is Presto and what is WebKit now from Opera. I have used Opera browser in past.

There are four rendering engines that the most popular web browsers use to provide their core functionality.

Internet Explorer uses the Trident rendering engine.
Firefox uses the Mozilla rendering engine.
Safari and Chrome use the Webkit rendering engine.
Opera currently uses the Presto rendering engine.

Most of the other less popular browsers are also built on either Mozilla or Webkit.

The rendering engine determines how the browser interprets the web page content in order to display it.

Gecko, isnā€™t it?

Oops - youā€™re right the rendering engine is Gecko. Mozilla is the useragent that identifies Netscape/Firefox browsers.

Do you mean Windows Phone? Opera was available for Windows Mobile according to their web site. Whether they still support Windows Mobile I do not know.

Sorry, yes, Windows Phone.