Opera Confirms It's Betting On WebKit, Chromium

[a user]

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'.

if my dad would have said this i could've had him understand.

but seeing this on an it-forum, especially on a such one as this one makes loughing out loud.

oh wait... looking at the last sentence i think even my dad wouldn't have made such a post.

[Licaon]

I was toying around with dwb ( http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ ) on my Raspberry Pi and lately on my desktop, looks like I'll switch to it in the end, Webkit is Webkit after all, right? I should search for a good RSS feed reader... :-\

[smitty3268]

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.

I assume they are using the V8 javascript engine instead of the one that comes with webkit, right? That's a significant amount of work there.

[DanL]

I understand the move completely. Opera devs have realized that further work on Presto would be re-inventing the wheel (and then spinning it in the mud) when Webkit is available. The best way for Opera to carve out its niche is to focus on innovating unique user-facing features (not making the rendering engine 0.0001 ms faster)

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.

You're "parasiting" on Phoronix's forum (and Phoronix is parasiting from vbulletin)! Write your own forum!
Seriously though, why do you object to sharing/reusing code?

[Vax456]

You're "parasiting" on Phoronix's forum (and Phoronix is parasiting from vbulletin)! Write your own forum!
Seriously though, why do you object to sharing/reusing code?

He's just trying to make himself feel superior to "the enemy" by shunning and pissing on them.

[Vim_User]

I don't understand some people here. They are complaining that anything proprietary is evil, but when a company decides to ditch their closed source efforts and to go open source instead the same people are complaining that this would be parasitic to the efforts of others.

Come on people, you can't eat the cake and still have it.

Another major contributor to Webkit is not a bad thing!

[Ferdinand]

Another major contributor to Webkit is not a bad thing!

So the monoculture that started with IE6 is not a good argument to you?

[n3wu53r]

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'.

No.

By moving to webkit they reduce costs and get increased browser compatiblity. Many sites nowadays are optimized for webkit.
This webkit monoculture is getting scary (especially on mobile) and is looking more like all over again IE6.

[Kostas]

While there are plenty of things wrong with monoculture in theory, are comparisons to the IE6 era fair given that Webkit is (afaik) currently the most advanced engine? (my main browser isn't even webkit based btw)

[DanL]

I don't think that lots of browsers sharing the same rendering engine will inherently lead to monoculture, especially with IE and Firefox still commanding a lot of users. There's more to a browser than a rendering engine, especially from a user's perspective.