9/13/2023 0 Comments Opera browser has engine go withThe big loss for the Web is a further decrease in the diversity of browser engines, especially on mobile devices. Their impact on Web standards will be dramatically reduced, especially where they want to do something differently to Apple and Google. It’s a sad day for the Web, since I thought highly of their Presto engine and their Web standards work. The news about Opera switching to Webkit is disappointing. Writing on this personal blog, Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan offers the following opinion: On the negative side, a number of arguments have been put forward. To date, reaction from developers has been mixed. An iOS version should follow shortly after, and their desktop browser products will also make the switch. The first Opera product due to incorporate the WebKit rendering engine is their new mobile web browser for the Android platform, due to be unveiled at the Mobile Congress event in Barcelona this summer. It seems to me that WebKit simply isn’t the same as the competitors against which we fought, and its level of standards support and pace of development match those that Opera aspires to. Rendering engines are now highly interoperable – largely due to the progress commonly known as “HTML5″, begun by Opera in 2004, then joined by Mozilla, in order to protect the web from proprietary platforms, keep it open and promote interoperability. Attempting to compete on standards support is like opening a restaurant and putting a sign in the window saying “All our chefs wash their hands before handling food”. Excellent standards support is a given in modern browsers. These days, web standards aren’t a differentiator between browsers. Other vendors have followed this path the world has changed. Presto showed that it was possible to make a better browser while supporting standards. Opera’s Presto engine was a means to an end a means for a small, European browser company to challenge the dominance of companies who, at that time, hoped to “win” the web through embracing, extending and extinguishing web standards. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.Ī post on Bruce’s personal blog elaborates further on the reasoning behind the switch: Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. When we started the spec that is now called “HTML5”, our goal was a specification that would greatly enhance interoperability across the web. When we first began, back in 1995, we had to roll our own rendering engine in order to compete against the Netscape and Internet Explorer to drive web standards, and thus the web forward. Writing on the Opera Developer News blog, Bruce Lawson, Web Evangelist for Opera, offers the following explanation for the switch: Opera Software have announced that they are abandoning their proprietary Presto rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit rendering engine, for future versions of their mobile and desktop web browsers.
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