Opera to switch desktop, mobile browsers to WebKit
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 13th Feb 2013 13:21 UTC
Opera Software De kogel is door de kerk: as we already talked about earlier, Opera is going to switch to the WebKit engine, leaving its own Presto rendering engine behind. We didn't yet know if they would the switch only on mobile or on the desktop as well, and they cleared that up too: both mobile and desktop Opera Browsers will switch to the WebKit rendering engine.
E-mail Print r 17   · Read More · 158 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/ko0
Thread beginning with comment 552361
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
telns
Member since:
2009-06-18

The are two things about Presto; one is that it tends to be standards compliant almost to a fault. If you make a site look good in Opera, you are almost guaranteed it is going to look fine in all the other browsers.

But even for everyday users rather than developers, when a company has developed a UI and engine side by side for years, a lot of the UI features come to depend on engine features. They work together.

Dragonfly is the most obvious example, but there will be tons of other things, affecting addons, and custom CSS filters, and the like. There is no chance that WebKit offers exactly the same hooks into that Presto does.

Most of the 'big' features they will adapt, I am sure, but all along the margins you can expect them to lop off the stuff that is really hard to do (cause for whatever reason, the object you need that is readily accessible in Presto is buried ten layers deep in WebKit) or not a big enough feature to be worth the effort--except it was the feature you used everyday.

In short, it is almost certain that some of the features that exist now won't exist in the initial WebKit releases, and may never come back.

Reply Parent Score: 5

PresentIt Member since:
2010-02-10

The are two things about Presto; one is that it tends to be standards compliant almost to a fault.

Yeah, except that's wrong. Opera has always gone out of its way to render sites, even when that mean adding proprietary stuff like document.all.

Reply Parent Score: 1

cdude Member since:
2008-09-21

If there is demand for a certain feature they can and will add it. They have now even more forces to do so since lesser work on the rendering-engine is needed. If there is no demand then indeed, that feature may gone.

If you had a look at WebKit code and development you wouldn't argue about 10 inches deep layers nobody can touch. That's not reality. This isn't IE :-)

Edited 2013-02-13 21:52 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

telns Member since:
2009-06-18

Umm... I have. I have done some custom [proof-of-concept] type projects using the Qt5WebKit codebase.

I like it just fine. But that doesn't mean that it will provide 100% of what Presto provides in a convenient way.

I would say exactly the same thing in reverse if someone were trying to take the Presto engine--which I am sure is also a good code base--and stick it into a long-term WebKit project.

Edited 2013-02-13 22:59 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3

Read more of this thread... >