Kimmo Kinnunen wrote yesterday on the GTK+-WebCore developer mailing list that he has imported the Safari 2.0 WebCore branch into GTK+-WebCore. "This means that from the webcore/javascriptcore part, the code is mostly
the same as in current Safari. So if there are any crashes, they're not
from webcore/javascriptcore part of the codebase with very high
probability, rather my code."
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Member since:2005-09-14
That may be true, but I've been using Opera for a while, and I don't think they're too worried about desktop market share, to be honest.
They'll take it, but from what I've seen they're more focused on phones and PDAs, which is where they actually make money. The desktop browser is still great and it gets a lot of their attention, but they're just not too concerned about taking market share from the other desktop browsers
Besides that, there's not too much hacking needed to get pages working in Opera. If a page works in Firefox, and passes validation, it usually works in Opera with minimal hacking.
But that's just my experience, and I'm a big Opera fan, so I'm a little biased.
Edited 2007-04-07 13:28
Member since:2005-10-02
If you avoid the newest fancy stuff or avoid IE-specific code Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, osb-browser (Flower) and most other browsers will render pages quite fine.
XHTML 1.0 + CSS 2 usually just works. Well, don't use PNG's if you want it to look good with Inter Explorer 6 
Opera's flaw no.1 is that it feels very foreign on all platforms. It is poorly integrated in Windows and poorly integrated in Linux. And it doesn't have all the nice extensions Firefox has.
However:
- it's starts faster than Firefox (but still too slow)
- has fewer problems with frames and flash (Firefox has this annoying bug when clicking on a link all or most frames on the page is opened in individual windows - and closing one of them crashes Firefox - it also happens with Epiphany, Galeon and Kazekahaze when compiled against Firefox) - however Opera still crashes on occasion when visiting sites with excessive use of Flash (solution: annihilate the webmaster!)
- uses slightly less memory (but still way too high memory consumption)
- Opera doesn't become unresponsive to same degree as Firefox when loading heavy sites (like ekstrabladet.dk or something ugly bloat like that - the proper solution would be to annihilate the webmaster).
Opera can be used but is not much better than Firefox, and the lack of extensions makes it irrelevant.
In order for me to consider another browser it has to support HTML, XHTML, CSS1+2+3, Java, JavaScript, and Flash - and have a low memory consumption and start fast.
If osb-browser had support for Java and Flash, Firefox would be unmerged instantly.
Member since:
2005-11-10
It would if they want their market share to go above 1%. Web developers have to deal all the quirks of Trident, Gecko and possibly KHTML/WebKit if they have access to it; debugging for Presto (Opera) on top of that to (with yet another JavaScript engine as well) is not worth the effort for minimal gains in users. Not even Prototype support Opera officially, they have too much hacking on their hands as it is.