Opera Confirms It Will Follow Google and Ditch WebKit For Blink

An anonymous reader writes "Google on Wednesday made a huge announcement to fork WebKit and build a new rendering engine called Blink. Opera, which only recently decided to replace its own Presto rendering engine for WebKit, has confirmed with TNW that it will be following suit. 'When we announced the move away from Presto, we announced that we are going with the Chromium package, and the forking and name change have little practical influence on the Opera browsers. So yes, your understanding is correct,' an Opera spokesperson told TNW. This will affect both desktop and mobile versions of Opera the spokesperson further confirmed."

Re:So webkit != Blink!

[yincrash]

They are keeping legacy -webkit prefixes and are not adding any new prefixes. Please see here [chromium.org]

Re:Differentiation?

[SpectreBlofeld]

They're obviously hurting financially. By switching to Webkit (and now Blink) they were able to lay off over 90 developers, some of whom had been with the company for 15 years. This sucks - for the developers, obviously, but I'm sure nobody was happy about making that call; but according to salarylist.com, the average software developer salary is around $81,000/yr which times 90 developers is 7.29 MILLION dollars a year. Not sure if Norway dev pay is equivalent to the US average, but you get the rough picture. That sort of sum could make or break Opera as a company.

I've been a fan of Opera browser for a very long time - I started using it right after it became free. Opera pioneered a great deal of features that are browsing must-haves today, implementing them years before any competitor. They remind me of another company that hailed from their land-mass-sharing-neighbors in Sweden: Saab. A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board. The first to do this, the first to do that - turbochargers on production cars, cabin air filters, very high crash safety standards, active seat belts (okay, that one didn't last long), active head rest restraints, refrigerated glove box (for taking that Chardonnay to the picnic of course), headlight washers, heated seats, the use of computers to automatically monitor and adjust the engine's operations based on the type of fuel used and sensor input, direct ignition, traction control, air conditioned seats, etc, etc, etc. Now compare to this list of Opera 'firsts':

http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations [operawiki.info]

Saab was bought by GM. When that happened, all their cars were mandated to be cross-platform cars. They shared chassis with other cars; some models (and SUV and a hatchback) were blatant rebadges of a GM SUV and a Subaru (nicknamed the Saaburu). Now Saab is no more.

Sounds like what is happening to Opera, unfortunately.

I know 'car metaphors' are a Slashdot tradition, but I find this one particularly apt.

Re:The Angels have the Google

[ChunderDownunder]

Ahem, I think you have the wrong franchise, and the OP was referring to Doctor Who [wikipedia.org]

Re:So webkit != Blink!

[TyFoN]

Blink is based on webkit which itself is based on KHTML which is as you might know is fully open source (GPL).
They can't really change that license :)

Re:So webkit != Blink!

[FunPika]

KHTML is LGPL, not GPL. While any modifications to the KHTML parts have to be open sourced, anything else linked to that can be under any license Apple, Google, Opera, or anyone else wants. If KHTML was actually under GPL, then while IANAL I am pretty sure that any proprietary code used in Safari, Chrome (not Chromium), or Opera (once it finishes switching from Presto) would be considered GPL violations. In addition releasing parts of Webkit/Blink under BSD (which is the case) would probably violate the GPL.