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."
So webkit != Blink! (Score:1)
The real question is will the corps and users want to keep old versions of Chrome around for their web apps and sites?
Many with -webkit CSS extensions wont work if Chrome gets rid of them. If Google calls it -webkit then we will have 2 different versions and web developers will be confused and not know which is which when users report a site looks funny.
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Yes, obviously the first thing they'd do is remove all of the useful functionality. You know they can keep the existing -webkit-* properties, and even add more assuming they're 100% compatible, right?
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Until they decide to discontinue supporting them. Google is fickle.
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So? It's fully open source.
Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
Installation Information (Score:2)
Blink is based on webkit which itself is based on KHTML which
is LGPL, not GPL
In other words, you claim that WebKit is based on LGPL code. I thought that like GPL code, LGPL code had to be made available for the end user to modify, and devices shipping with LGPL code had to ship with "scripts to control installation" (v2) or "Installation Information" (v3) to let the user install modified versions. So how do manufacturers of locked-down devices that use WebKit, such as Apple with its iDevices, get away with not shipping Installation Information? Or has all LGPL code been stripped out
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That is meaningless for large projects. No single person can hope to do anything. You would have to hire a team of developers to maintain such a fork or do the impossible task for getting them to work on your fork for free.
As a user of open source software, your options are limited in that its no different from proprietary software for practical purposes.
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Sigh, this ancient FUD again.
Here's a cluestick sunshine. The whole point of fee and open software isn't about everybody rolling their own. That's just a thoroughly overused ant-foss astroturfer talking point.
When the source is open, and a product is desired by enough people and products, the community will pick it up. Open Office was forked when Oracle looked like being a threat, and that's a very substantial project.
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It's this sort of dull, repetitive FUD that's killing Slashdot.
There is NOTHING interesting about this comment. It is a straight regurgitation of Microsoft's "Scroogled" smear campaign which is being upvoted by their sockpuppets.
It is dull. It is boring. It is commercially motivated. It adds nothing to the conversation. So fucking LAME!
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.
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Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Standards keep the various vendor's implementations compliant.
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Where I am from there is only one standard. It is what the user uses that previously worked fine. If IE 6 works for Dell EMS then IE 6 is the standard and IE 10/Chrome break it according to my users and therefore are the broken ones. The browser is never blamed. And mentioning W3C is behind their comprehension.
That is the point. Whenever someone uses something it is not the defecto standard and if it tries to do things the right way in future releases the user will consider that one broken so in the case of
Re:So webkit != Blink! (Score:5, Insightful)
Standards keep the various vendor's implementations compliant.
Laws prevent crimes.
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If you point is that an inanimate object "Laws" prevent human behavior then yes, at times, you are correct.
However your trite comment is trivializing, viewing the world in black and white, and comparing apples and oranges.
e.g. We have a _standard_ about red traffic lights to _prevent_ crimes such as (traffic) accidents. We have laws (& penalties) so that motor vehicles have functioning brakes to prevent [future] crime. Standards provide a framework. If everyone just ignores the standard then there wa
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Excellent, having gone back to firefox, webkit-only should be nipped in the bud.
Forking (Score:1)
Says it all.
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Just Don't Blink, Blink and you're dead
Don't turn your back ......
User configurable (Score:2)
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
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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
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Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
Yeah, that will work real well with clueless (l)users complaining why a site wont work to developers.
What engine are you using IE, what version, IE, what setting, IE hey you are going to fix this or what!
At least now you tell them about IE for the version. Or the logs will report it. Imagine if Firefox emulating trident IE 8 displayed different than IE 8, but was recorded as IE 8 in the logs?
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.
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My fear now is Chrome is the new IE 6 of this decade.
With things changing and mobile users monopolized on it this will get confusing as much as different versions of IE last decade which is why the corps all standardized on IE 6.
Mobile sites will go through hell next and it might hurt Android and help IOS if the -webkit extension is removed or if W3C changes a standard that is different from the -webkit one. Look up IE boxmodel? This caused hell as IE 6 was ahead in this arena and W3C changed it and Firefox
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""We are not browsing a vendor-agnostic web. IE6 simply had shitty enough CSS that, when IE7/8 corrected it, the bandwagon pointed at ACID3 and declared this the promised land of standards-compliance, ignoring that this is just a calm between storms. Mark my words, "Best viewed in" is returning, and it will be just as bad as you remember. You'll know it finally happens when jQuery gets fed up with an engine and takes sides."
You mean how JQuery 2.0 wont support IE 8?
That I am in favor of. The corps will whin
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Jquery 2.0 supports all modern as in less than 2 current releases old. I hate to bring to you but, Firefox 3.6 is not modern. It is old, buggy, insecure, archaic, and now over 2 years old and should be dropped. Its marketshare is beginning to match IE 6 and is now below IE 7. I was a big firefox fan but even started playing with IE 8 at the beginning of 2011 as Firefox 3.6 was just terrible and felt more like old IE than its phoenix beginnings.
But that has changed and it is a much improved browser.
I use ESR
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.
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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.
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You can. You open Firefox if you want Gecko, Chrome if you want Blink, Safari if you want Webkit and IE if you get a brain disease and think opening it is a good idea.
If you want them in one program its simply not possible. Too many interlinked rendering components.
E.g. Firefox's entire interface is made with XUL which is rendered the same way as pages. Put webkit in it and webkit can't do XUL so you need Gecko anyway for the interface. Get the idea?
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The whole point of forking is that there's something you don't like about the project you're forking from. As long as that's a technical decision rather than a political one, supporting both old and new versions undermines that technical justification, since it sticks you with all the problems of both versions. Not to mention that it adds the complications of making swapping possible. It's a terrible, terrible idea.
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Does Google have a compelling business case for such an option? If so, please explain.
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.
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WebKit2 is already used for Safari (desktop). At some point in the future, it is presumed they'll use it for iOS Safari as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_%28web_browser%29#WebKit2 [wikipedia.org]
The Angels have the Google (Score:5, Funny)
Remember: Don't Blink
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Jar Jar Blinks
So does Yoda.
Re:The Angels have the Google (Score:4, Informative)
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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: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.
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My fault. I still have troubles in considering Trident a serious contender when talking about rendering engines and standard compliance in the same sentence.
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How have they yielded any authority in the standards process? Have they been blocked from the W3C?
Focus on the boring bits? Quite the opposite. Now they'll have time to do more cool stuff instead of always catching up with the other ones.
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Strange, I thought Bing was the default search engine.
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Opera isn't dependent on Google for the browser. They just happened to choose a specific technology platform
How do you know the chrome is only slightly different to Chrome?
If Opera is Google's bitch now, that's not new. That must be because 1/3 of their revenue is from Google. But that's going to change since other business areas (such as ads) are growing very quickly.
In fact, I would say that Opera is less of a Google bitch now than it was just 6-12 months ago.
Blink is open source (Score:2)
If Google close it or do anything worth forking for, Opera will fork.
http://www.chromium.org/blink#participating [chromium.org]
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Actually, if Opera is Google's bitch now, it's less so than ever. Opera is getting more and more revenue from other sources than Google, and is probably more independent from Google financially than ever before.
How are they depending on Google for the browser? They are basically letting Google do the ground work, and doing the easy and fun part on top of that. Seems like a win-win situation to Opera.
How do you know that the UI will just be "slightly different"?
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It's lacking what, exactly? In many instances, it has more functionality by default, since it doesn't require plugins for things that should be standard.
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Oh, they are lost are they? How so? And when did that happen, exactly?
They seem to know exactly what to do, considering that they have more users than ever, and are constantly reaching new revenue and profit heights.
What common behavior is Opera lacking, and won't that automatically fix itself with Webkit or Blink?
Re:Differentiation? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Differentiation? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry. I don't get car metaphors. Could you restate your argument as a superhero metaphor?
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I'm sorry. I don't get car metaphors. Could you restate your argument as a superhero metaphor?
Opera's becoming Superman with a load of kryptonite stuffed up his arse? Chromium's the Silver Surfer with his cock cut off. IE is Iron Man without batteries. Firefox is Woody from Toy Story.
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Opera really wasn't the first in most cases, and they implemented the features very POORLY, only to have other browsers eventually come along and show them the right way to do it.
Tabs: Opera was second behind another little known IE shell, and their method of cycling tabs in LAST-USED order, and having those tabs appear as loose windows INSIDE of the Opera window was a nightmare that resembled MS Office 7's multiple open docu
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Actually, Opera did tabs right. They had proper MDI, while Firefox just had inflexible tabs. Opera didn't copy Firefox. They just changed the way they did MDI, but it was still proper MDI.
Opera also did proper popup blocking befire Firefox came around and copied it.
Opera also did proper fit to width, while Firefox didn't have anything like that. And yes, they did do the zoom and fit to width methods you see on phones today. They did it with the Wii browser, which came out before the iPhone, and they did it
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"Nuh uh" is not a rebuttal... I was there through the years, trying to use Opera. It sucked, for all the reasons I listed.
If I was wrong, Opera would have a vastly larger user-base today, instead of being a tiny also-ran.
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You are not a god who represents everyone else. Your opinions are not global. Your opinions are yours. I explained how I think your opinions are false. I pointed out that Opera actually did MDI right.
Also, Opera is not tiny. It has more than 300 million users, and is quite big in parts of the world. It's always been one of the top 2 or 3 browsers in Russia and former USSR states, for example.
What's been holding Opera back is that it's been ignored and blocked by sites, causing stuff to break. This makes it
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No, you asserted that Opera did tabs correctly. Your opinion on the subject has no more weight than mine. Meanwhile, you completely discounted, and failed to explain away the FACT that Opera later directly copied Firefox's tab model (while keeping its old tab method as an option). You also failed to explain why opera's stupid method of cycling tabs in historical order is any better than letting the window manager do it, or how having multiple browser window
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Actually, you made the assertion. I merely contradicted your assertion.
Opera never copied Firefox's tab model. It added an option between behaving the standard MDI way, or behaving the way other tabbed browsers did. Of course, later they merged the two, giving people the best of both worlds. Firefox copied other tabbed browsers.
You are just trolling about Opera, so I decided to set the record straight.
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A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board.
Pioneering things means nothing if you can't make money in the process and by the late 1980s when GM got involved Saab wasn't making money.
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.
Saab wasn't bought by GM at first, GM basically invested in Saab until they finally bought them out. The shared chassis thing is also BS since Saab ignored it for most cars or basically rebuilt the whole thing anyway. Saab was bleeding money the whole time GM owned them and things like the shared chassis were attempts to stop that. Which Saab ignored until going bankrupt
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Hurting financially? Whatever gave you that idea? They've reached new profit and revenue highs every single quarter now for a long time.
They didn't lay off 90 developers. They laid off 90 people in total, including sales and marketing personnel. About half were engineers, which includes testers. So the real number of programmers is probably around 20 or so, which is a very small number compared to the several hundred developers that are still working there.
Being bought sounds like what is happening to Opera
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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".
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You're a retard. Chrome is the very definition of the OPPOSITE of stagnation. Google is very active in the development of Chrome and has been since their inception. You can thank them for spurring Mozilla and Microsoft to get off of their asses and make the web better.
already fallen out of love with google (Score:2)
:>)
This slashdotter already has fallen out of love with google. I've got no google accounts and google-crap is noscripted out and DNS-blocked. I only have to allow
Open source Presto? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any chance Opera would consider open sourcing Presto since they plan to drop it?
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That's what I was hoping. You know what would be hilarious? If Google changed their minds and decided to adopt the then-open Presto as their engine instead!
Really, though, I think Opera should have tried that first. They obviously decided to switch so they could lay off their 90+ engine developers (which they probably have to do for financial reasons)... but they could have open sourced the engine first and therefore get dev help from the community, instead of tossing Presto in the bin and walking away.
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A few years ago, I was in the market for a simple html rendering engine for an embedded project. There were only a couple of options: webkit, presto and one more engine that I dont remember the name of. The licensing fees that opera wanted were astronomical and only the likes on Nintendo could afford it. Needless to say, I used webkit even though Presto was more desirable.
Anyhow, they should have open-sourced a few years back and snatched up a large portion of embedded market (which is actually quite big if
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i.e. the comments and variables are simply too full of expletives and racial slurs to bother cleaning up.
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.
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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.
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Opera just reached 300 million active users, up from 200 million a little more than a year ago. Falling behind?
They don't have to back the strongest player. They have to choose the technology platform that best fits their needs to keep growing.
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Google can't close the source for a simple reason - WebKit's LGPL!
See, WebKit was derived from KHTML, which was a LGPL'd rendering library. Apple took it to create WebKit. Apple released the source under their LGPL obligations. Apple got roasted for 1) not releasing the logs, and 2) not providing history, so KHTML guys were furious because they couldn't take the changes back. Apple relented and released it completely.
All throughout, the core KHTML stuff has
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Sorry?... I have been using Opera on Linux since the late 90's. FreeBSD and OSX are also supported as was Solaris for a long time. They are also present on cell phones since forever and the browser in the Nintendo Wii is also Opera.
I just do not see that great insistence on the MS Windows ecosystem.
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.
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I continue to see Opera fall.
Opera 12.15 64-bit is the best browser ever produced, on Windows at least. Though the other browsers are catching up.
There is no reason to believe that Google will not increasing put closed source components into Blink.
If they do, Opera will just fork.
Sad (Score:1)
How many single authors left? (Score:2)
In fact, apart from the venerable iCab on macs (and, much more recent, on ipads), is there just any rendering engine that's still developed by a single individual out there?
(before you start shrugging, let's remind iCab invented ad filtering some ten years before Mozilla was *born*)
Wonder if Opera knew about Blink (Score:3)
before pensioning off Presto...
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Ctrl+F12 > Search > Untick "enable search suggestions."
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Ah, that's too bad. I had never used the option.
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The search box allows use of the option to disable reuse of the same window, which allows searches to open in a new window. So it does provide extra functionality, and I have found nothing useful to take up the space that would be freed by the search bar. Always open to ideas for such though.
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