Opera moves to WebKit
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time.
... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera.
Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around.
They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it.
EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for).
Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets.
"They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about."
This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.
I'd also love to know where 300 million is coming from, as it seems extremely high.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.
As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.
Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time?
As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor).
ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.
The Chromium Embedded Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) isn't too far from that. I'm not sure if Opera is using this project in particular, but they do mention using Chromium.
As there are so many would you mind listing a few?
Edit: my bad, the graph probably didn't refresh properly
Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)
Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)
Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.
Why do you think Google is desperate to enter these markets right now?
I think by far the biggest impact was bundling Chrome and autoinstalling it with Java and Flash updates. Google must have paid top dollar for it which Firefox and Opera had no chance of matching.
Possibly. But they're also the only browser I'm aware of apart from IE that supports "document.all". And (at least as of 2007), they were still using IE's quirks mode box model if you didn't specify a doctype.
As I said, they did a good job of trying to please everybody. You could code for Firefox or IE and have a reasonable expectation that it would work on Opera too.
That's a good thing, by the way.
Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time (which is implemented by copying certain quirks--and O isn't the only one that does that--as well as having a large database of popular sites that are fixed with bits of custom JS), or you disagree that Opera aimed and successfully did implement web standards (which is provably false).
Saying "possibly" makes it sound like you don't really know. Did you consider, while typing that remark about the downvotes (bad form, and doesn't add anything to the discussion, except for polarizing it even more), that it might actually be caused by your self-admitted lack of knowledge on the subject?
Sure thing, those people may be "Opera devotees", because those are the people that know what they're talking about maybe?
You claim that top post was "not actually an anti-Opera comment". What about your remark that "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about"? That was you baiting all of those European and Russian Opera users, that you may or may not have noticed are also here on HN. If you had said "the browser nobody in the US actually cares about" then yes, I could not have disagreed. But this general claim is a tad ignorant, the global 1.3% market share is not at all geographically evenly spread, and goes up to 47% in certain countries. That's a long shot from saying nobody cares about it.
(BTW I may be an Opera devotee--a little bit less than I was a few years ago though--but I'm not downvoting you)
I'm guessing OP meant possibly for the "sometimes for their own bad" part of the comment.
Noble aim but that doesn't work in the consumer world. I am pretty open-minded, so I am seriously trying to use Opera every 2 or 3 years. And each time I really start to enjoy using it but after one or two days I get horribly disappointed: a significant number of websites I like just doesn't work. Not just loss in function, they are completely unusuable, for instance I get a white page.
Last time I did this try is probably 2 years ago. Last time I observed this behaviour with another non-IE-browser: at least 5 years ago, probably more like 8.
There was a time when certain websites only worked with IE. Somehow Mozilla and friends adapted... but what happened to Opera? I cannot stop thinking that Opera somehow got stuck in the 90s. They are certainly innovative, they were the CSS pioneers, everybody copied tabs and other cool features.
But still... When your rendering is incompatible to the real world, nobody will use you. So I can only agree: smart move. Maybe this will make Opera a serious competitor in the Browser market again.
Anyway, I also agree, Opera still has a user base. I work on an in-house tool and we have users using Opera, so I test against it.
You're saying that's the fault of Opera when it's possibly the fault of lazy devs.
You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera.
(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)
Obviously it's "hobby devs" breaking the standards and Opera having low tolerance for that. As a matter of fact, a large part of the web's success is due to hobbyists. The hobbyists were only able to contribute to the success because it was and still is so easy. You don't have to be a HTML or JS guru to create a dynamic web page. On the other hand this allows for many devs that never even heard of HTML validators, JS linters etc.
I think it's good that most HTML/JS implementations are very fault tolerant. It's good and the decline of XHTML, XSLT and friends underlines that.
>You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera. >(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)
In 2003 Mozilla and friends had the same problem sometimes too.
Except that is not true. Opera has a high tolerance, probably much higher than any other browser (out of necessity). But that doesn't help much if you're being blocked or sites constantly find new bugs in other browsers they decide to work around and thereby breaking it in any browser that is not one of the top 3.
It is true that Opera tried to reverse engineer more of the IE DOM than most others, for example we were the only ones to have attachEvent and friends. But in recent years that caused problems with sites that made false equivalences like "has attachEvent -> must be IE" and so non-standard features were being actively removed.
It is also true that Opera has been heavily involved in the standards process; both in codifying the legacy and in more forward-looking initiatives to add novel functionality to the platform. For example Hixie was working at Opera when he started work on what became HTML5. Opera's Simon Pieters wrote a spec for CSS quirks mode [2]. We have also been involved in numerous other specs, and in the beginnings of the effort to produce a comprehensive vendor-neutral testsuite for web platform technologies.
[1] http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/... [2] http://quirks.spec.whatwg.org/
Not quite. They always made every effort to be as compatible as possible with real world sites.
Hello. Now you know at least one. :)
Of course FF, Chrome/ium, Safari, IE take priority, but I still run everything by Opera too. I just love Opera and have since I discovered MDI > tabs in the early 2000s, among other things.
This change will make all that easier though, so nice to see it.
PS - I didn't downvote you, though don't consider your comment particularly worthy of upvotes either.
And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will tell you another story for Opera, not supporting Opera there "because it only has 1.6% worldwide" would be a dumb reasoning. What matters for your choice is the market share on your properties, not on others' properties.
As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concerned and preoccupied with complete and totally accuracy (like we often are on HN and miss the forest for the trees because of) Opera really isn't much to worry about. It's a great browser and all but you can bet that if you're building a new web property you're not going to see a lot of Opera users with 1.6% market share worldwide. Sure, you might get lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) and somehow get a swarm of Opera users but I also might win the lottery this week too.
>the browser that nobody cares about
>Now they see Chrome is going to win
Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate.
>copying Chrome
They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.
It doesn't actually imply any of that.
No one's saying Opera hasn't innovated. Only that it's not very popular and that, in addition to their innovations, they follow trends. That's not a passive aggressive statement.
> They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.
The commenter was suggesting that Opera is now choosing to be "standards compliant" because the current most popular browsers are, as opposed to Opera's choice in the past to be non-standards compliant to copy the top browser of that time, IE. If the top browser is standards compliant, and you want to copy it, what would your browser end up being?
Before, Opera "copied" Trident by implementing the same quirks so pages behaved the same way. They were not standards compliant, and Trident was not standards compliant. Trident failed at certain implementations, and Opera deliberately failed at those same implementations to achieve the desired effect.
This is misleading nonsense. You led people to believe that they would just make a copy of Chrome, but they will obviously not just compile Chromium and give it a new name. They will most likely bring the entire Quick framework and their existing UI to the Chromium framework.
You don't know very good web devs then. By far the easiest path as a developer is to develop for opera, then test the rest. You end up with far few problems that way. If you develop for firefox or chrome it is easy to write a bunch of stuff that works in that browser, but not in the other, and then you have way more work dealing with fixing it. Opera is strict enough that if it works there, it is almost certainly going to work everywhere else (not old IEs obviously).
For example, the difference between "bring on the monoculture" and "this is a sad day for web standards" is likely to influence Mozilla's future direction, both directly and indirectly (via the choices web developers make in supporting or not supporting Firefox).
How so? Like Chrome copied Safari because they're both using Webkit?
> They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it.
That's the problem for you Opera bashers. It will now have room to grow and get a much bigger user base on PCs.
Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company.
I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers.
A big loss for the general state of rendering platforms though, with now only Webkit, Trident and Gecko as serious contenders.
But on the same note, I understand that using webkit will be better for Opera as a browser.
It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone would be significant.
So if there was no legal constraint, Presto could see day of light. If nothing else, then in patches to webkit :)
opera:about
and look at the list of Third Party Software...
What IP or userbase does Opera have that either Google or Apple would want? If either of the two of them wanted to copy Opera's browser features they would just go ahead and do so.
If anything this makes Opera less interesting as a potential purchase. Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP.
They mostly do. Dozens and dozens and features. But it works other way around as well, and it's a great thing in the end. The most beneficial features are virtually on every browser.
How can it be worth anything when the competition is free?
Do you remember how long it took Google to port Chrome to Android? There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.
That's why I installed opera on my phone. It works so good, I never bothered to install chrome on it. So it looks like I'm an Opera user. Granted I still use chrome/FF on everything else...
It definitely feels like the winds of change.
EDIT: Found the article: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/02/12/opera-founder-sells-....
For the same reason, this also leads to degradation, and slows down the evolution of the engine. A good example is gcc vs clang. For years gcc was the compiler for *nix, then clang comes along. This led to a new found enthusiasm to make parts of gcc better. The same happened for firefox when chrome came along. and works the other way. We even have half-decent IE releases now.
It's not as if the browser vendors simply do a 'git pull && make' every couple of weeks.
But your point is taken.
People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact.
So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores, by all means try to get them to all switch to WebKit.
My point is that it's bad if all browsers switch to WebKit and web sites absolutely require WebKit to work correctly, which is what the parent of my comment was suggesting should happen. This point is somewhat independent of what happens with Presto per se.
That's true, but those companies also make much more products. Mozilla has significantly less employees than Opera.
What gives Google, Apple and Microsoft power is that they also own the platforms. (And now you'll understand why Firefox OS is a thing)
Hu, really? Would have thought the opposite as Mozilla gets 100 million dollars a year from Google.
That's a couple hundred more than Mozilla has now (after Mozilla added a lot of employees in the past few years). OTOH, the numbers are no longer that significantly different.
It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit.
On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define standards as 'whatever webkit does'.
To the extent that "whatever WebKit does" gets defined as "whatever ugly, lowest-common-denominator thing that works in the stock Gingerbread browser" that might help other rendering engines stay in the race. In other words, legacy Android browsers might help by slowing down the spread of new WebKit-specific features (that they also don't support).
I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.
This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need.
That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.
But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic?
No, it's totally the opposite. They only have to be "compatible" with this one implementation, and are free to rely on all implementation-specific bugs or implementation defined behavior when doing so.
Think IE box model around the IE5/6 age. Or hell, supporting Office Documents. Even if you'd have the source, being compatible certainly wouldn't have gotten much easier.
Note that WebKit is open source and Opera is having problems being bug-compatible with it.
Although there is a chance here for the -prefix-rabbit-hole to yawn wide, there's also an opportunity for a (nearly-)universally-supported rendering engine to emerge that could, one day, get into bed with the standards committee. Surely this would be a good endgame for the browser wars?
Note that coding to an implementation rather than a standard does stifle innovation, because when you code to target the implementation you inevitably rely on bugs in the implementation, without ever knowing or trying to. From the perspective of an implementor, would you fix a bug even if it meant breaking an unknowably large number of websites? If not, you've adopted that bug for the rest of time, and every subsequent implementation, ever, will be forced to implement the bug as well when they could be busy implementing new features. Now compound this by thousands of bugs, and reflect on all the time spent implementing Quirks Mode in every browser engine that exists today.
I do agree with you that in a perfect world we wouldn't need multiple implementations, because bugs would not exist and the lone implementation would track the standard perfectly, and because the standard would be controlled by neutral third-parties. But I think it's much too soon to declare the current era the browser endgame.
Robustness often comes from the opposite approach. It's the willingness to throw out ideas and code that are observed to be broken. Replacing JavaScript with a more sensible scripting language like Lua or Python would increase the robustness of the web, while standardizing it further only entrenches the problem deeper.
I call on your "no need to rehash it here." Without even one good example, I'd say you're just trying to be elitist.
Let me help set you on the right path. Google for "javascript semicolon insertion". After reading about it, it should be very apparent to you how it's a very large flaw with the language, and how it can be extremely harmful.
Do some research into JavaScript's equality operators. Any good programmer will be sick to his or her stomach after reading about how broken such basic, yet essential, functionality like that is.
And that's just the start, my friend. I encourage you to do further research on your own. You'll find no shortage of serious issues to learn more about.
For example today I just browsed my Internet provider's customer area. Their online invoicing page only works on Firefox and IE7, but not IE8, IE9, Opera and Chrome. Urgh.
> WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build
> their own version with any fixes or changes they like.
So now you have a fixed WebKit that nobody else uses.
It's about the same as when you start at a company with a large existing codebase. You're not going to get much done until you've read and understand the chunks of the code that relate to what you need to do. This spinup time is definitely bigger than the hour it can take to fix a bug in a small project that you previously had no experience with, but it's definitely within the realm of the possible.
> Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and
> webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still
> people use their engine.
Don't forget that on mobile platforms, not including Windows Phone, WebKit is already the standard engine. Safari, Android's stock browser and Chrome all use WebKit and developing for mobile is a ghetto, especially because each version has their own quirks and bugs (and there are dozens of Android stock browser variations in active use at any given time).
WebKit can be maintained, forked etc as the world pleases.
I agree that if there is to be a rendering engine monoculture, it might as well be open source, but that in itself guarantees nothing.
Even today, mobile users typically account for only about 10% to 15% of a site's traffic, for sites that don't directly target mobile users. Mobile just isn't as important or widespread as a lot of people think it is.
Their February 2013 results are at: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2013...
It gives a good sense of the current situation. Mobile browser usage is under 15%. It's nothing compared to the usage of desktop browsers. The growth from 2011 and 2012 isn't even that impressive, given the all of the hype and attention surrounding mobile.
Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.
Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished.
This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough.
If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team).
Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".
Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.
If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine
Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".
A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.
This is stopping evolution, not helping it.
>>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.
I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future".
>Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".
We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact.
Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".
>A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.
Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.
Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as opposed to the global one).
Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".
You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear. Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a contributing factor to Opera's decision.
Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to standardize the API, which precludes future competition.
The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a spec.
In the case of canvas, not really. Apple created canvas for Dashboard widgets. Were it not standardized, canvas would never have been a web technology.
So the question is is a fork "true" competition or more of a "suggestion" for a feature change?
Or to put it another way, instead of evolution happening (as in the best win and the worst die) we now have a situation where the winners and losers are decided by subjective individuals (i.e. some project manager somewhere decides to import a forked branch back into their main branch).
How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a WebKit monoculture will stifle technical innovation in web rendering engines, because they'll be constrained with being (bug-)compatible with WebKit.
webkit routinely gets breaking changes, it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features. Wouldn't having a load of developers in different environments, working on the same codebase actually accelerate innovation? Something could go from W3C/WHATWG draft to implementation in a matter of weeks, then we wouldn't have things like css3 gradients or flexbox syntax changing completely after years prefixed in the wild.
Real innovation is far more drastic and disruptive. When it comes along, it often meets heavy resistance from those who are entrenched, especially when these people may not benefit from it. This is true even within open source projects. Unorthodox ideas will often be brutally crushed, even if the benefits they provide are immense.
Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns.
> accelerate innovation?
Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing.
Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base, for example.
I don't know enough about the webkit architecture to say anything, but I guess it wouldn't be any faster if it started with Presto.
So my point wasn't that one would build such a UA by starting with Presto. My point was that there are distinct advantages to competition over everyone using the same rendering engine.
If both of those companies are working on the same product, then it might follow that 2X units of effort would lead to the implementation of feature Y and feature Z. Or that feature Y is implemented in less time.
It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question.
The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.
In the case of web rendering engines, for example, I don't see "evolution" getting us to a rendering engine that can usefully parallelize over, say, 64 cores starting from the engines we have right now. And monoculture would ensure that we never get there.
EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com:
parseInt('06'); // 6
parseInt('08'); // 0
Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.
parseInt('08', 10); // 8
strtol("06", NULL, 8); //6
strtol("08", NULL, 8); //0
Javascript was bad for making that design decision in 1995, when nobody seriously used octal for anything, so the leading zero was vastly more likely to introduce a class of WTF bugs instead.
Sure you can. Read the Fine manual: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Referenc...
tldr: parseInt("08", 10);
$ perl -le 'print 07'
7
$ perl -le 'print 08'
Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
$ python -c 'print 07'
7
$ python -c 'print 08'
File "", line 1
print 08
^
SyntaxError: invalid token> parseInt("08", 8);
returns 0 instead of NaN
>>> parseInt("123foobar", 10)
123https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...
Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser with native tab stacking.
It also used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active tabs (hell, the only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome).
There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am not in a rush to switch.
Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts, and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still huge.
Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now.
I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it for for over a decade.
And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.
It's entirely possible that I have lost bookmarks to this, but I wouldn't know from the utter clusterfuck of it all.
Speaking of rel="next", it is an incredibly sad state of affairs that sites such as Daring Fireball can't even be bothered to use it, just because other browsers aren't using what is so obviously a treasure to web browsing. Opera even wanted to use this for swipe left-right navigation on touch-based devices as evidenced in a presentation years old now.
Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the packages play nicely with each other.
Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by many people, each of which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which attract much help may be of very poor quality.
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misu...
Bad developers are already ignoring everything except whatever single browser they [might have] tested in.
This move certainly is unsettling, but I think you can come up with a better argument about why.
The "mobile" sites out there are overwhelmingly WebKit-only. We're talking sites from Google, Disney, Apple, various news sites, etc, not sites done by amateurs.
And they're not accidentally WebKit-only in many cases, but deliberately so.
But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for exploring, prototyping, experimenting, where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for, because of resource constraints.
In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice, but you can see how they're just different perspectives.
While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for
In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation,
that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards.
E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative. Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)
[1]: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/...
Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?
Oh yeah also, while I guess it's missing a lot, the code is actually very, very readable. That's nice.
https://github.com/mozilla/servo/tree/master/src/servo (the actual layout engine part)
I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 Opera was my savior through the years.
Opera provided SDK and offered custom development services around their platform for a good price. Honestly, I don't think that their business model would suffer much because of the switch.
The primary benefit of Presto are very modest hardware requirements. It can run on almost every hardware platform (even something that doesn't have a proper port of Linux core and GCC). That used to be pretty important in 1999, in 2005 and even in 2009, but in recent years it gets a lot cheaper to grab a good enough ARM core for your device, slap either a small Linux kernel, or even Android on top of it; rather than having a dedicated team of engineers struggling with something that barely runs an odd build of Watcom C compiler.
Opera was always moving against the mainstream. They optimized for worst hardware while it was getting better. They optimized for limited bandwidth with Mini while network speeds were rapidly increasing. They optimized for memory consumption with Futhark while Mozilla and Google were busy breaking JavaScript speed records.
None of that were bad moves per se, but this company is very different from its competitors. Maybe that's the main reason why it survived and has been moderately successful during all these years.
As a result, their userbase also moved over time. They got popular in Easter Europe in late 90s, moved to South East Asia and South America in the middle of 00th, and now are very popular in Africa. They used to be pretty big on desktop, then moved to mobile, and now to embedded and devices market.
I remember seeing a number of blog posts where web developers dismissed the importance of Opera, saying that only Russians and people from Africa are using it and they are not the ones who click on ads and make purchases. Wbedevs criticized poor developer tools, poor graphic performance, weird bugs. Google always tried to persuade Opera users to switch (http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-th...), Yahoo pulled it from their Grade Browser Support (http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/), John Resig's slide got picked up by masses (http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png).
One thing where Opera shines is a UI innovations. When Chome was released I counted about 30 big and small things that they wisely borrowed from Opera UI. That was almost five years ago and Opera was moving fast, too. Mouse gestures, broad customizability, passionate users and some of the greatest people working in the company. I'm pretty certain that Opera's future is bright and shiny!
---- Former Opera employee and devoted user, speaking for myself, obviously.
That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!
And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.
It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.
Of course, only desktop Firefox.
Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of how it was done" archiving.
It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary obscurity
I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't going to be the only ones affected.
Edit: rephrased for clarity.
Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users using it and being happy.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/
back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.
[BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.
I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as they have always done.
Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser.
I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising down our throats cough cough Facebook and Google.
I wonder what'll happen to Dragonfly, their integrated development platform? It was a neat project, although arguably inferior to Firebug/Chrome Dev Tools in many areas.
Good luck Opera!
But (rightly or wrongly) this news does mean I'll give Opera some serious consideration. If it's Webkit, I can use it with confidence and if Opera's developer tools are better than Chrome or Safari, then it will become my browser of choice.
I doubt I'm the only person thinking this way. So that's one more reason this could be a great move for Opera.
Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could come, fork it and make it better.
Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.
Get with the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.
I used to be a hardcore Opera user (as a regular consumer) till Opera 10, mainly because of the beautiful inbuilt download manager and the smoothness of their usability.
However, for professional work and testing - The only three browsers I use for testing these days are Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+.
I never used to consider Opera because, for MY website, the traffic from opera would be really negligible to make it worth the effort getting something right on their browser, though Opera would 99% of the times be almost as perfect as chrome, unlike IE.
Now, this move only makes designers' lives easier, needless to say. I'm just waiting for the day when Microsoft would put down their pride of using a stinky, inconsistent rendering engine and move to Webkit, just like Opera and that day would be the start of a new era - Where designers can focus on getting their designs right, than focusing on how to get them right on various browsers.
Cheers Opera, Great move!
Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...
I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996). But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got tired of it.
And I think they are tired. They're talking about finally impacting the future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing them to do that.
That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-b...
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-ne...
(those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother linking)
Opera was my primary browser before Google Chrome. I tried sticking to it but it was always left behind. Then as I dived into Google's services more and more, it was clear that Opera wasn't a consideration for Google.
Want to Drag and Drop something in GMail, not possible! Any other cool features on many other websites, no!
Now that they are switching to Webkit, I hope Opera gets support for all these features.
This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!
Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.
Does anyone know what will happen to Dragonfly after the switch?
I don't think gecko was ever a serious choice for them.
A sad day.
New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents.
Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that standard.
There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't using them at all.
It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.
Firefox is working on it, but it's an uphill battle.
"mobile" sites are overwhelmingly coded to be WebKit-only.
It just matters that there are competing engines. As long as there are multiple implementations, we will have a formal standard for HTML and Co. If e.g. everybody (Microsoft,Mozilla) would adopt WebKit, then nobody would bother to extend the HTML standard. Just implement it in WebKit. Soon, HTML will be a mess like Office Open XML.
With Gecko you get heavy-duty OOP module system riding shotgun (XPCOM). That seems to be a sufficiently high barrier to contributors that only Mozilla are using Gecko with any seriousness.
Webkit has evolved out of a different history as a sorta-kinda standalone component of KDE to be much more approachable to outside contributions. Since Apple forked it from KHTML it's gone from strength to strength.
The number of comments here surprises me, I would have thought this irrelevant news.
A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told that they can't make it work properly on Opera.
I'm sort of including dom<>js relations as part of the js problem tho.
On the other hand, DOM APIs are rather less interoperable across browsers for both historic (lack of clear standards until recently) and technical (larger surface area, faster pace of addition, lack of proper testsuites) reasons. Therefore they are by far the more likely place to run into an interoperability issue.
Opera really follows the standards, and if I found any bugs they were often an indication of a fragile part of the code that needed fixing (Opera was very useful for finding dodgy areas of my code).
Of course it depends upon the features one is trying to use, not just the quality of the code :-)
I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering engine.
This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.
As for Apple, there are probably just programmers on a payroll. Apple has a different culture. It is a Steve's workshop, where they "invent" things, or whatever they think these days.
Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission-critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways.
This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser without me actually doing it. That's when I could no longer even allow it to be installed on my system.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I had to share this in case anyone wants a different perspective.
We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what mods are for.