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I don't, the webkit monoculture on mobile is increasingly terrifying.

I has its advantages, this is the argument I used to convince to my superiors we needed to standarize the company browser to Chrome, that webkit is in every movil OS, macs, windows and Linux, and now, all I have to do is program to webkit, but, only to HTML5 not to webkit's special features, and, now with Opera running on top of webkit, we can switch from Chrome to Opera, cause I don't trust Google to be spying in our company.

Edited 2013-01-19 15:04 UTC

This rumour isn't even about the desktop Opera, just about some new mobile browser (it's right there in the summary) ...I don't suppose you do development work on mobiles. ;p

Edited 2013-01-26 23:15 UTC

It doesn't bother me too much. If WebKit development ever stagnated, the browser makers would just fork it.

And then do what?

You can't change the default browser on iOS. Forking WebKit won't change what Apple choose to do. It won't change what Google do. Forking WebKit achieves almost nothing as far as user-freedom is concerned in real terms.

If WebKit stalls then Apple will be a competitive disadvantage compared to the superior forks, and there will be no financial incentive to continue supporting Apple's platform.

That's assuming that Apple cares about web apps.
If anything, it appears to me that Apple are trying to obsolete the web with their app store.

Apple may not care about web apps, but the rest of the world does.

I'm sure Apple are crying all the way to the bank.

Apps will never replace the web. It may displace usage for certain things but if you think it will replace the web, you've been drinking too much of the Apple Kool-Aid.

How quickly people forget.

When the iPhone first came out, there was no app store and Apple was pushing developers to make web apps for the platform.

Developers and the media raised a stink until Apple developed an SDK and built the app store.

That's in the past; I think it's safe to assume Apple prefers now to push usage of their appstore over webapps.

If Apple wants to stubbornly force all users of their operating system to use *their* web browsing engine, then your problem is Apple, their OS, and the phone you bought from them that enforces these rules. Use that phone to give Apple a call and tell them to fuck off, and then just go buy something else--preferably something that doesn't eliminate all competition before it even has the chance to exist. Problem solved.

I don't know what your real terms are that you're using to define "user-freedom", but I think I disagree.

Have you ever tried writing your own browser from scratch? I mean, even a simple text based, no javascript one?

Forking it won't immediately change an ios user's experience, but that's kind of a narrow view. Webkit itself started off as KHTML. I bet you would have written off the continued development of KHTML as well. Who ever thought that KHTML was ever going to be used by real people, ever?

Once source is free and open, it ends up being found in the most unlikely places imaginable. If its not Apple's gear, then maybe someone you've never heard of will rise up and perfect the brain-computer interface complete with a forked webkit based interface. You just never know. Having a free piece of valuable software like a rendering engine lowers the barrier to entry, encouraging competition.

This is only terrifying if you want to preserve W3C's power over the web, rather than a self-governing open web. What I mean by that is that it doesn't matter what the name of "standard" is (be it WebKit, or HTML5, or whatever), as long as it is open, developed in a cooperative fashion and has multiple players in it (which WebKit certainly has). We can see multi-dev agreements on web protocols and formats all over the place (between Mozilla, WebKit users, MS, etc.) without the need for a formal institution like the W3C. That's why I don't share your fear of monopolization of the web as happened in the 90s with IE.

Edited 2013-01-19 16:49 UTC

There's nothing terrifying about the W3C. They are basically the only true guarantee that the web stays open.

You can't compare WebKit to HTML5. WebKit is a project run by someone who controls it and its directly. HTML5 is a standard agreed on by basically everyone.

You are extremely naive if you think companies are going to suddenly start supporting each other. And if they are going to agree on standards, they basically need an independent organization. And then you're back to the W3C.

You can kill of W3C but another W3C will still be needed.

You obviously haven't heard of the WHATWG then?

Companies do collaborate when it suits their needs i.e. why the WHATWG exists and other organisations that have several companies funding them.

So was Microsoft cooperating with the rest when it was so dominant it could basically block other browsers?

Nope.

The WHATWG ended up going to the W3C. Funny, that.

Actually browsers like IE6 was actually built on a draft standard that was later changed.

Standards that people actually use, IE8 was actually ahead of Firefox, pity the usability sucked.

Edited 2013-01-20 11:37 UTC

Actually, IE6 implemented a whole load of non-standard extensions.

IE8 was not ahead of Firefox, as far as I can recall.

And I think you are extremely naive in that you think that only formal standards bodies can facilitate cooperation.
Btw, how's that HTML5 standard coming along? Do you think that after about a decade of bickering we deserve a finalization? HTML5's first public working draft was in freakin' 2008 and it won't be until the end of 2014 that it will be finalized - 9 fucking years! In a technology space where often no more than 6 months is the separator between releases of game changing products. I'm sorry, W3C used to be very important in the past, but I feel that the volume of red tape has really swelled recently to the point of making W3C really quite impotent.

Not only formal standard bodies can facilitate cooperation, but it's the only thing that can ensure an open web.

What about HTML5? Parts of it are ready already. But as you may notice, doing things properly takes time.

I wouldn't call most of the stuff in HTML5 as a dynamic, interactive and multimedia rich language done well.

The problem with W3C isn't that they're perfecting the language - which takes time. It's purely politics.

The bottom line is that things need to be done right, and the W3C ensures that this happens.

The thing I find frustrating is that HTML 5 and other new web tech has all been lumped together. Which really muddy the waters.

While some of the newer tags are useful, for describing content, the main thing I want to use is CSS 3.0.

I thought the point of the W3C was to spend 20 years drafting a standard for a technology while at the same time drafting the next 3 versions...

...and then producing something so complex and unreadable that vendors just decide to impliment there own interpretation

That's weird because the vendors are involved in creating the specifications...

They are basically the only guarantee that it'll take 10+ years for standards to get ratified, and browser makers will keep putting custom shit into their browsers while the W3C keeps dragging its feet.

10+ years? What are you talking about?

The fact is that doing it right takes more than a few months.

According to Wikipedia, they started work on HTML5 in 2004. They hope to have a final draft by 2014. Not that I'm really impatient, but 10 years? Geez.

Edited 2013-01-20 20:11 UTC

They did not start work on HTML5 in 2004. They presented Web Forms in 2004, which was to become part of HTML5. And even after it was merged into HTML5, they kept adding stuff to the spec.

In other words, it has not taken 10 years to finish HTML5. Parts of it are already done, and other things were added later.

Mozilla is the only alternative now.

There's IE engine. Dolphin browser currently also features custom engine (that is faster than anything else anyway)

afaik Dolphin is based on WebKit.

For what it is worth Netsurf is maturing. Has lots of rendering backends for different operating systems and is starting to grow javascript support. Its also more modular than any of the alternatives from what I can tell.

It used to be about on par with dillo but now there is alot more CSS support and from what I understand DOM support is being improved alot.

As far as dillo it is pretty stagnant... considering one person forked it and made a way better version in a few months im not impressed with the current main developers. DPlus (the fork) is nice on very old hardware and for speed. The biggest change for me being that it doesn't leave background processes like dillo if and when it crashes.

I don't think Hiev actually means it. It seems to be a Futurama movie reference.

Does the Apache monoculture on servers terrify you as well?

There's no apache monoculture on servers. Apache is continuously losing ground to better and lighter alternatives like nginx.

What Apache monoculture?

Any monoculture is bad. Especially for security.

One of the worst things about it is that Firefox for android is actually excellent, yet somehow remains a niche player.

Firefox for Android won't install on my phone (Galaxy Ace). Not enough RAM, apparently. Things might change when even low-end Android phones have at least 512 MB of RAM.

Yeah, it ran horribly on my desire, but on something like the galaxy nexus, it flies.
Try it out when you get a better device, the interface is amazing.

I see Mozilla continues on its old ways... (they had ~two mobile attempts in the past, terminating with ~"we'll wait for better hardware")

Hey, we're experiencing the OSS guys dream come true.
Could KHTML developers back then even dream of that?

Uhhh...did he mean to say it takes a big shit? And what's a "roder"? me thinks Mr Holwerda shouldn't be posting past happy hour.

As for the news, close the doors and give the money back to the stockholders. What is the point if its nothing but a skin on webkit? And why isn't Opera growing some stones and suing Apple for what is obviously anti-competitive behavior? last I heard the EU didn't take too kindly for the "lock in the users, our way or the highway" attitude so you'd think they'd not cave just because its an iToy.

If all the companies keep rolling over and kissing the ring of Apple we might as well accept the future is gonna be nothing but locked down game consoles, where you can't do anything without corporate approval and the second corporate doesn't support it anymore into the trash it goes. Never before have we had such great tech so cheap but instead of this empowering us we're gonna end up with the worst of the 80s, where everything was locked down and proprietary and didn't play nice with anything else.

A skin is just a bunch of images. A completely new UI built from scratch is a huge undertaking. If they do make a new UI on top of WebKit it's going to take a massive amount of engineering resources.


Why would Opera sue Apple? Antitrust cases are not decided through the courts. It's handled by the Competition Commissioner. And obviously there's no basis for reporting Apple

You are extremely ignorant if you think it's a matter of Opera admiring Apple too much to do anything. There's simply no basis for an antitrust case. Not yet at least.


Who is doing that? Not Google. Not Opera. Not Mozilla. Who are you talking about?

Not necessarily, if the code isn't tightly coupled together they could just swap it out.

Recreating the whole Opera UI on top of Chromium requires a hell of a lot more than simply swapping something.

It depends how it was built.

Agree. Apple policy is actually much worse than the one MS got sued for.

Nice to see somebody else notices the exact same crap MSFT got busted for Apple is doing WORSE and getting away with it. I mean imagine if MSFT had locked Windows to the hardware so it was impossible to install any other OS and made it so the ONLY way to install programs without actually having to hack the OS was to go through a site where they kept God-like control and refused to have any competition to their own products?

And I apologize to those in the EU if I don't understand what procedures one performs to get something taken up by the EU commission, we don't have anything like that in the USA anymore so there really is no basis of comparison. The DoJ was defanged by Bush II after the MSFT case and pretty much just rubber stamps anything a corp wants to do so you can be as anti-competitive as you want here as long as your lobbyists cuts checks to the right people. Kinda sad when the only hope Americans have of not being screwed by a monopolist is the EU taking up the case, but that is the only hope we have left, everything here is for sale like some banana republic.

Apple is not doing worse than Microsoft because Apple is not a monopoly. Additional restrictions apply to monopolies, which affected Microsoft, but it does not affect Apple.

Yeah, a correction is in roder.

Good point.

I also note that among the many quotes in the article, not a single one is about Webkit. Nor is the video.

I've used Opera for over a decade; it rescued me from the constant BSOD hell I was experiencing on Windows 98 (!) when using IE.

The idea that this innovator will become just another shell on top of someone else's rendering engine saddens me... if it turns out to be true.

Edited 2013-01-19 16:16 UTC

But what if they are moving all the resources currently being wasted on constantly chasing compatibility problems to making innovative features instead?

I too was thinking, 'too bad.' But one of the biggest criticisms of Opera is that it doesn't always render EVERY page correctly. If they're using Webkit, it should effectively render every page on earth that Webkit does. Maybe that's an improvement in the opinion of Opera's developers.

Secondly, maybe the rendering engine part of a browser is commodified now. Opera's still my main browser and they're still innovating, so let's see what they can do.

Perhaps they felt that the rendering engine was too much effort, and that they could get the same results regardless of engine, especially with weblog being open for them to add to.

That being said, the above doubts as to the validity of this news seem justified; opera have always led the pack with compliance and new rendering features.

Sadly "Opera leading the pack" with respect to compliance and new rendering features has ceased to be the case.

Opera were very late indeed to implement ECMAscript 5 (the new JavaScript standard), IIRC coming in behind Microsoft. Some modern CSS3 features such as 3d transforms, transitions, and animations which, whilst pioneered by WebKit, were all implemented on Firefox earlier.

It has seemed to me for quite some time that, with a few notable exceptions such as webforms support, Opera have been lagging behind the competition.

Cherry-picking a couple of standards and claiming based on that that Opera is lagging behind is disingenuous at best.

They do not have a choice on iOS, they have to use WebKit or not have a browser at all. The same problem with Chrome or Firefox on iOS, they also have to use the Apple WebKit shit.

Exactly. The competition has deeper pockets, so why should Opera spend tons of cash making their own engine and constantly struggling with compatibility when they can just grab a free engine that someone else is kind enough to make for them?

What if they could put all those resources they are wasting on constantly dealing with compatibility and staying up to date with the engine, and instead put everyone on making UI and services?

Presto might be fast and portable, but everyone is moving to phones that have multi-core CPUs and run at 1GHz or more. And everything except Android and iOS are basically irrelevant at this point, so who cares about portable?

Why would you leave your 20 year investment in your own technology behind and switch to something that will provide no competitive angles to the competition?

It is *not* free to switch, you will have to relearn the technology and reprogram all that you have invented previously, like Opera Mail, Unite.

I still don't see it. Unless they are only switching the rendering engine? Still a lot of work, still a lot of reprogramming...

Perhaps they took some advice from Nokia?

Symbian was largely external to Nokia, too. And now, after retiring Symbian, Nokia seems to focus more on Series40 (their internal OS technology) than it was the case over the last half+ decade.

This is actually not such a big switch from a technical perspective. Opera uses Qt as its toolkit, and Qt had already adopted WebKit as its standard rendering engine a long time ago. So essentially, they are just switching from a custom rendering engine to the standard rendering engine of the platform. In addition, Opera always has the option to integrate their Carakan Javascript engine, if they are unsatisfied with the performance of JavaScriptCore or wanted something to differentiate themselves from the rest of the WebKit crowd

Edited 2013-01-19 17:36 UTC

Opera doesn't use Qt as its toolkit
http://my.opera.com/kilsmo/blog/2008/01/29/opera-is-not-based-on-qt
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-of-us-to-a... (search for "Qt" in this one)

So to clarify, at some point in the past, Opera's compatibility layer used Qt on Unix, but not at this time?

Edited 2013-01-19 18:11 UTC

Also the comments...

PS. You edited your post while I was replying...

In general, when Qt was included, it was just used on *nix for platform integration purposes... (as the first link above states)

PPS. Also, in 2006, before the removal of Qt: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=156356


Edited 2013-01-19 18:21 UTC

Sorry about that, I saw these comments on the Opera blog before seeing your reply

Because your 20 year investment is bogging you down and leaving you well behind the competition?

Because switching to the technology the competition is making for you for free suddenly gives you loads of spare resources that can be used for actual innovations instead of constantly trying to catch up?

Using the same engine as another browser doesn't mean you have no competitive angle. That depends entirely on what you build on top of the engine.


Unite is being dropped.

And while it's not free to switch, the resources used to build something on WebKit would otherwise be wasting their time constantly fixing compatibility problems. And once the port has been done you suddenly have tons of spare resources that used to be dedicated to building a separate engine. This makes sense if you think ahead a few years.


Sure, it's just a rumor based on basically nothing. But it would not be a stupid thing to do. The reprogramming would be done by people who would otherwise be working on the current engine.

Well, I hope it will pan out well for Opera. Surely it must be painful to dump your own technology and switch to the competitors tech? I would be gutted if I was working for Opera.

I actually don't think Opera has a technology problem that needs solving with Webkit, more a marketing problem.

At least the latest 12.12 desktop browser seems mighty fine and it has proper extensiosn (finally after so many years)

Another problem with webkit might be that you have to keep different code bases for desktop and mobiles which might to extra costs and compatability issues.

I guess we will know in a year if it is a good move.

Opera does have a technology problem. It's called clueless web developers coding for specific browsers instead of open standards.

If you read official blogs you'll see that tons of resources are wasted on fixing compatibility problems. What if all those people working on that were working on cool new features and technologies instead?

That's probably not really true yet. Things might appear so if you're in one of the most visible, affluent markets.

However, since we're on the topic of Opera, and when talking not about sales but what people actually use...

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vendor-ww-monthly-201003-201301 - still plenty of browsing from Nokia devices, none of them "Android and iOS", Opera capable of running on most of them ( http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201003-201301 & http://www.opera.com/smw/2011/11/ - mostly S40 "feature phones")

Mobile vendors? This is about browsing the web on your phone. Did you look at the stats lately (flawed as they are)?

Opera Mini can run on all those Java devices. But for full browsers there's basically just two targets.

It encourages people to unknowingly code for quirks of HOW WebKit implements a standard.

I believe there were some IE6-era Javascript things that would never have worked in V8 because, while they worked in IE6, they weren't part of the standard and were incompatible with V8's approach to JITing.

The older IEs use something called JScript, which isn't JavaScript.

If all the browsers are webkit, we will end up having a mono-culture like IE6 and we will have another lull in innovation yet again.

Not only that, it is already a pain that each browser has a different Webkit version.

This leads to browser specific hacks everywhere.

But so is the world of the so called "web development", code once, hack everywhere.

Luckily i don't develop for mobile, but I don't envy those who do.

On my case it depends on the project.

Shit sounds better. And definitely more funny. And it hasn't been changed, so...

Edited 2013-01-19 19:52 UTC

Sorry, I wasn't home (I was being awesome elsewhere). Fixed it, and sorry!

Hey, no need to be sorry about a laugh.

Apple is not a conviced monopolist. Microsoft got a fine by being far worse than Apple is. Educate yourself, young man.

Apart from being incredibly rude, your comment denotes a huge lack of law and real-world knowledge: you do not need to be a convicted monopolist to be doing something illegal.

Problem is this would be a long and very expensive trial and nobody wants to be in bad terms with Apple for the future.

Apple isn't doing anything illegal. They have not been shown to break the law. They don't have the market share to justify such claims.

Who gives a crap if they are "in bad terms with Apple" or not? Apple is not God.

Who gives a crap if they are "in bad terms with Apple" or not? Apple is not God.

They are god in regards to approving or rejecting your app in their stores. So yes, they ARE god.

In addition to that, companies think in the future: will I need a license from Apple to manufacture magsafe connectors? cases for their phones? will they delay (almost impossible to prove) approving your app?

If Apple was to start rejecting an app because of something like this, the competition authorities would definitely open their eyes.

How would you prove the reason Apple has rejected/delayed your app is you brought them to trial for some other reason? It's nearly impossible.

You don't have to. Apple needs to prove to the competition authorities that they rejected it for the right reasons.

Why is everyone assuming that this video is real?

Incompetent people like you are the reason the web sucks.

How would dropping Presto make it shallow? You wouldn't even notice. What you will notice is the user interface.

Seconded. I started using Opera when they made it free and for a lot of time it was the browser I used. It was much more lightweight and responsive than Firefox back in the day, and while it had some broken features, the most broken of which I remember being the cookie management, the positive side of the Opera browser made you ignore those shortcomings. I liked it over Firefox so much that even if I was a NetBSD user, I would install the Linux emulation environment mainly to use Opera.
Then, Opera 10 came and it was never quite like what it used to be. It began to use a lot of memory, it began to crash frequently and if left in use for some time with a lot of tabs open it would even start to leak memory. Crashes due to broken JavaScript code are *not* acceptable.
I switched to Firefox for the time being, which at least, is better than the last Opera versions.
But I don't like the memory hog that Firefox is, and I really want to switch to something much more lightweight, say, NetSurf.

The fact that the Android version, and not just the iOS one, is using WebKit is the nail in the coffin for everything unique Opera Software had to offer. At this point, if they do not intend to develop the Opera engine further, at least they could open source it, WebKit is open source as well anyway.

Edited 2013-01-21 15:46 UTC

I remember reading the exact same comment you are writing now, only it was about Opera 6, then Opera 7, and then Opera 8...

Every version brings someone who insists that "Opera has lost its way." Pretty hilarious.

How can Presto be the only unique thing Opera offers, by the way? You can't even tell which layout engine the browser is using. It's something the user never thinks about.

It's just silly to claim that Presto is the only unique thing Opera offers. Ignoring the UI is just ignorant and lame.

To be fair, Opera did seem to have (in my experience) such issues in the timeframe he describes - from 9.5 (IIRC - the first release after the "old style" 9.27) to ~10.5, when browser makers were scrambling to caught up with the performance of Chrome js engine ...so maybe other priorities took a back seat.

Didn't really stop me from using Opera, though. And more recent versions are working fine.

Edited 2013-01-26 23:11 UTC

There will always be some guy somewhere who hates whatever is the latest version of whatever application you are looking at. I remember reading comments on Opera back in 2001 or so, and people were talking about how Opera had "lost its way" even back then. Opera was soo buggy, and it was much better before 2000, and so on. It's pretty funny to read the exact same comments year after year, when someone else has figured out that they don't like something so they become drama queens about it.

I never stated that it was anything other than a personal opinion. People use software in different ways, so are effected differently by significant changes to that software.

In my experience, people like you who complain about complaints are just as likely to kick up a fuss when it's your favourite features that are broken.

A solution to this would be for developers not to make radical changes to the UI without allowing customisation, not to break useful existing features, and to fix newly introduced bugs quickly and efficiently. In my opinion Opera Software have failed pretty miserably at that.

This rumour isn't even about the desktop version, nor all mobile ones...

Going to other browser makes no sense - it will be even more alien to you than "Webkit Opera" (which at this point is just a rumour, anyway; and only on some mobile devices)