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.