Opera Confirms It's Betting On WebKit, Chromium

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Opera Confirms Its Betting On WebKit, Chromium

Opera will slowly be moving away from its own Presto rendering engine for its closed-source multi-platform web-browser in favor of using the WebKit rendering engine and is also beginning to back Google's Chromium project...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwMDM

[Ferdinand]

Worst news of 2013 so far.

[brosis]

Opera is irrelevant. Its too late.
They are/were closed and move out only to survive, the new solutions are probably also closed.
They all fail to understand - they need to innovate to become top players. Which means going freedom software in new areas that are interesting for people, instead of making gold nuggets to hide in corporate cases.

[Sonadow]

To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

"The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need," says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. "It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.".

And now Opera becomes a Chromium shell?

But Chromium --> Support PPAPI plugins ---> Support Pepper Flash ---> Opera uses WebKit + Chromium ---> Opera will support PPAPI ---> Opera will be able to use Pepper Flash?

I say go for it.

[uid313]

Maybe they are trying to cut costs by parasiting on the efforts of Google and of the open source community instead of having to develop and maintain their own engine.

Too bad there is less of web browser diversity due to this move.

Oh well, fuck Opera and their propiretary software. Might as well use Chromium instead of their closed-down proprietary software that leeches on WebKit and Chromium technology.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

The Google Chromium is fluff. The bulk of the work by Apple and Google is done for WebKit, not to mention WebKit 2 created by Apple. Basically, Opera is adding their branch and any custom interfaces to their value added features and using the Chromium branch to do the heavy lifting.

They picked that one because it gives them Linux, OS X and Windows simultaneously.

[Desiderantes]

If they open source Presto, we don't lose anything, instead, we win a free browser engine, so everybody wins,

[ChrisXY]

Oh well, fuck Opera and their propiretary software. Might as well use Chromium instead of their closed-down proprietary software that leeches on WebKit and Chromium technology.

Read the press release, they say they want to get involved in the development and say they already did commit some patches for multi column rendering or stuff. Maybe they don't, but it would be a bit too early to be sure about that.

[Ferdinand]

Read the press release, they say they want to get involved in the development and say they already did commit some patches for multi column rendering or stuff. Maybe they don't, but it would be a bit too early to be sure about that.

They are throwing away 17 years of work. Apple used khtml because they were afraid that building it from the ground up would be too much effort. And now Opera, who already has a modern working engine, is throwing that away because maintaining an engine is 'hard'.

[Ferdinand]

If they open source Presto, we don't lose anything, instead, we win a free browser engine, so everybody wins,

If I gave you a million dollars you would be a millionaire.