Opera browser switching to WebKit & V8

my.opera.com

30 points·izuzak··10 comments

I'm not sure I should be happy or sad. Part of me is happy that I have one less rendering engine to worry about, other part of me fear that the fact that WebKit dominating the market (now with only three major players playing, WebKit, Trident and Gecko) means the start of "this website works best when viewed with WebKit-based browsers" era via the use of non-standard -webkit vendor prefix.

It's kind of unfortunate that this had to happen. This will only further entrench the WebKit hegemony in mobile devices.

Genuine question: now they dumped their own rendering and javascript engines, what are the compelling reasons for using Opera?

GUI, features? Users don't even know what is a rendering, or javascript engine. They don't care unless it's exceedingly slow.

Some potential selling points:

Despite not being open source they've long supported the standards-based and royalty-free web.

They have server based compression tech for low-bandwidth usage.

Long history of developing mobile browsers.

They're one the few that make both a mobile and desktop browser on multiple platforms. I use Firefox on Android and it's best feature is that it has all my bookmarks, history etc. from my desktop usage on Linux.

Same as before for me; mouse gestures, awesome speed-dial, custom search keywords and possibility for a lot of customization.

Features, their rendering and javascript engines were the reasons I left Opera for Chrome. They will get me back in a heartbeat if this works out well.

One less rendering engine is very bad for a free and open internet. I suppose that there are at least there are still three viable ones left.

Please open source Carakan and Presto - we want to learn from you guys!

I hope they will go one step further and finally open-source it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com