Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_james | Hacker News Reader

Reading articles like this makes me wonder my Opera bothers having their own HTML engine at all (at least for desktop). Why not use webkit and help develop that? I cant see any advantages from Opera's point of view, just a big bunch of problems, and another set of browser specific bugs for web developers everywhere.

I mean, how many man-hours were wasted (for Opera and the BBC) as a result of this bug alone?

View on HN

Their entire business is based around this browser engine. The better the desktop version is, the better their mobile and embedded versions are. It's noticeably faster than webkit in resource-limited environments.

At one time a company spokesperson said that they'd considered open sourcing the engine, but they didn't think their development process or income model made it a viable choice.

You could make exactly the same argument about Webkit itself, or about any of the extant HTML engines, could you not? Why did any of them decide to complicate the web by multiplying the number of engine-specific bugs in the wild? Why didn't every browser project just start with the Trident engine in IE?

Not that I disagree with your point, but Webkit wasn't a new rendering engine. It was a fork of KHTML (the engine behind Konqueror).

Only MS can improve and fix the Trident engine, for a start.

Yes, which is an advantage, if you're of the opinion that the existence of a variety of engines (and the corresponding existence of a variety of bugs) is a hassle that's hurting the web.

That's not my opinion, mind you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com