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:So webkit != Blink! (Score:2, Interesting)
Until they decide to discontinue supporting them. Google is fickle.
Re:Poor Opera (Score:3, Interesting)
Open source Presto? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any chance Opera would consider open sourcing Presto since they plan to drop it?
Opera's appealing features (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an Opera user, I use it mostly because I like its UI and sidebar panel. Killer feature I liked was the password manager, just hit the key icon and login onto a site, even if you have many popups of the same domain, logging into a single page logged you into all of them automagically. Firefox still bugged me at that time with a username/password per page and that was what drove me over to Opera.
Opera used to have SpeedDial well before Chrome and Firefox but both of them have similar versions now along with tabbed browsing etc...
Opera didn't always work on all sites, but it's UI and general features made it worth it. Hopefully they keep it, its sad to see Presto go but with Webkit/Blink I guess we get more performance and compatibility.
Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:4, Interesting)
assuming they're 100% compatible
The fact that this is a massive assumption once the codebases start diverging was the point of the GP post.
Re:Poor Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an Opera user myself and while I agree that (one of) the main reason(s) for this preference was the functionality of the whole thing, I did like the Opera rendering engine, and often found it to be more standard-compliant than other engines, even when it had less coverage. I'm a little afraid that the Blink switch will break some of the functionalities I've been relying on (such as the ‘presentation mode’ in full-screen).
On the other hand, with the Blink/WebKit fork we are probably going to have three main engines again, and this is a good thing.
Re:User configurable (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
I have just been digging around and think I can answer this question. It seems that the reason for this is to do with the upcoming webkit2 Apple project taking a very different approach to how multiprocess stuff should work. They have some pretty diagrams here showing the differences: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 [webkit.org]
Google have long taken the approach it seems to just have entirely separate processes for each page talk to a webkit subprocess via api calls.The webkit2 project are taking a different approach by trying to put multiprocess stuff actually into the webkit2 api itself.
Since Apple will probably throw webkit out the window anyway when webkit2 is ready it seems that everyone moaning about Google here may be a bit backward. It seems that when Webkit2 is ready then everyone except Chromium will use it. Chromium won't need to use webkit2 because it is already designed to do what webkit2 does anyway.
I have to admit, I have a gut feeling here that wrapping the multiprocess stuff around webkit ala chromium is actually a better idea than trying to do what WebKit2 is trying so I think the chromium devs might be making a better choice from a technical perspective even though it probably is a bit more resource hungry.
Of course much of this about Apple adopting webkit2 for Safari all pure speculation, but then it has to be when you are talking about a closed source product like Safari and don't work for Apple.
Re:User configurable (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's only half of the story - they're using a different thread model because they wrote it themselves and didn't allow Apple to merge it into the original code base. So the fork is not really based on a technical reason.