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-....
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.
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.