Opera Confirms It Will Follow Google and Ditch WebKit For Blink 135
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:User configurable (Score:2, Insightful)
Because it is LOL to fool with the rendering engine.
LOL this looks great in IE7, looks like crap in IE8, doesn't work at all in IE9, and looks great in IE10. Why not extend that type functionality to all browsers?
LOL LOL LOL
Re:User configurable (Score:5, Insightful)
Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.
Re:User configurable (Score:5, Insightful)
Google says they're forking for technical reasons -- Google uses a different thread model and security model than Apple and making a hard break makes for easier maintenance. If they're going to keep both rendering engines around and updated then there would be no reason to fork in the first place.
Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they don't keep -webkit-* enabled forever. The CSSWG agreement doesn't say anything about phasing out existing prefixed properties, but keeping them around with outdated syntax/behavior doesn't seem like a good idea. It was never good practice to use a prefixed property without its unprefixed version. So if removing prefixed properties breaks some pages, that means they were broken in the first place.
You must be new here :-)
Things stay freaking forever in the industry once it someone or a corporation is dependent on something. IE 6 and XP is still being used with its users considering an open standard broken because it breaks and broken standard to them which is open. Logic is backwards but CMS never get replaced, sites stay, and users whine and blame YOU if something doesn't work. Never the product.
This is a classic lesson on why standards are so important and why going proprietary is bad. Not a closed vs open debate more than a standard one. Stuff never goes away even if it is broken.
Google is so fickle. Don't build on their stuff. (Score:1, Insightful)
One of these days slashdotters will fall out of love with google and see them for who they really are. Don't be evil? Right... The evil say that much like how dictatorships are called "Democratic Republic of".
Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead they are hitching their wagon to a convenient big horse instead of just being an innovative company. And i think that it will end badly. There is no reason to believe that Google will not increasing put closed source components into Blink. There is no reason for Google to eventual be civil with Apple, in the way that Apple was eventually civil with KHTML. At some point, unless Opera has some sort of secret agreement with Google, it can only be assumed that they will not have a guaranteed future.
Re:Poor Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Opera.
I don't use it for it's rendering engine, but rather for all of the functionality it has by default that other browsers simply cannot do. (Even with extensions.) So, the fact that it is becoming more compatible with most websites is great news for me. It means they can continue to innovate like they have done for years. (Most modern browsers use things that were created by Opera ages ago.)
They are not becoming Google's bitch because rendering was never their main feature, they are simply adopting the engine that everyone develops for while retaining the functionality that Opera users actually use. Sure, some of us will decry the switch because Presto was one helluva light engine and we lose the work done on it, but other then that, this is actually good news.
Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:5, Insightful)
Standards keep the various vendor's implementations compliant.
Laws prevent crimes.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
The other day, Opera announced that it has grown to 300 million active users, up from 200 million 1.5 years ago. And several quarters in a row now, they have reported record revenues and profits.
How is Opera falling exactly, when all the numbers are pointing up?
It started with the insistance on the MS WIndows ecosystem instead of bringing the incredible functionality of other OS.
What are you talking about? Opera was the first browser company to focus on mobile (back when everyone laughed at them for thinking that anyone would want to browse on their phones), and they started working on Mac and *nix versions in the late 90s.
Does not compute. The whole point of moving away from Presto was to be able to spend more time on innovation.
How is Opera hitching their wagon to anything? They can fork at any time, or move to some different engine.