Opera switches to WebKit

[smurfy]

[img]http://imgkk.com/i/p452.jpg[/img]

[url]http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/13/opera-300-million-users-webkit/[/url]

[quote]Opera has announced that its range of Web browsers is now being used by 300 million people each month to navigate the Internet across mobile phones, PCs, tablets and more. The Norwegian firm is marking the milestone with the announcement that it will transition its browsers over to the open-sourced WebKit, in a move that will eventually end the development of its own rendering engine.[/quote]

[Panda X]

Interesting move, wonder if this'll change anything in terms of usage on the desktop for them.

[Val67]

RIP Presto

[TheDecryptor]

This will be good for Opera users (They'll suddenly get access to more sites that used to block/break for them), but probably not good for the overall web (WebKit has a bunch of non-standard stuff that "pollutes" the net, like IE6 did, another browser using the engine is only going to compound that)

[smurfy]

[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;39573508]WebKit has a bunch of non-standard stuff that "pollutes" the net[/QUOTE]

What like?

[TheDecryptor]

There's small stuff like it mishandling the font-family CSS property on purpose, to them never removing prefixed properties (That's such an issue that Microsoft released a document about how to write for the standard, not just WebKit), to other things like Google wanting to replace JavaScript with Dart, etc.

The main issue is the use of prefixed properties without including the standard properties, it encourages authors to use the prefixed variants over the standard ones (Their behaviour never changes or is removed, so to get the best support in WebKit you need to use the non-standard variant)

Edit: And how could I miss NaCL, it's basically ActiveX for Web 2.0.

[i_speel_good]

I wonder what this will do to Opera Mini. It's the only java application I ever use on my dumbphone...

[Val67]

[QUOTE=smurfy;39573521]What like?[/QUOTE]

The -webkit- CSS properties, when developers don't bother to add standard CSS properties

[Fate]

[QUOTE=Val67;39573569]The -webkit- CSS properties, when developers don't bother to add standard CSS properties[/QUOTE]
That's poor developing, really.
Webkit supports the standard ones now (ie border-radius rather than -webkit-border-radius) now, I believe.

[Van-man]

[QUOTE=i_speel_good;39573559]I wonder what this will do to Opera Mini. It's the only java application I ever use on my dumbphone...[/QUOTE]

abandon it for ordinary cellsphones most likely.

[Recurracy]

I never understood why CSS still isn't standardized. Can't companies just agree for something on once? What's W3C's take on this, by the way?

[Rautapalli]

[QUOTE=Recurracy;39573798]I never understood why CSS still isn't standardized. Can't companies just agree for something on once? What's W3C's take on this, by the way?[/QUOTE]

It is standardized. The vendor prefixes are for features that are not finished yet. Like SataniX said, many of the CSS3 properties that used to have the -webkit prefix are now complete and do not require it anymore.

[backwardspy]

This is nice to hear, I love Opera for many things but the occasional compatibility issues with its rendering engine could be annoying sometimes.

[TheDecryptor]

[QUOTE=Amiga OS;39573906]-webkit-perspective-3d:

It allows you to deform and translate 2D elements inside a 3D viewport.
Its a cool feature, but buggy as hell and completely non-standard.
...[/QUOTE]

And because it triggers WebKit on OS X to promote that element to it's own CoreAnimation layer, it's now suggested as a standard method for "improving performance". Firefox supports something similar (That is, it breaks the page up into separate parts to render on the GPU), but if anything it'd probably just slow the page down in Firefox, etc.

Edit: What Mozilla (and apparently Google) are doing now is to hide everything behind preferences. The latest Firefox nightlies support WebAudio now (Which I got completely wrong in another thread), but because it's hidden behind a preference pages will never see it unless the user opts in. Which is much nicer than using prefixes.

[InsanePyro]

I do like Opera on Android. Don't care much for it on a desktop though

[Van-man]

[QUOTE=The golden;39575720]This.

I have to keep Firefox installed as a backup because some websites just don't render properly, including some sites where I make online purchases.[/QUOTE]
Hency why I use Chrome on my Windows Machine for such sites.
But that's because Opera isn't trying to be bleeding edge anymore, but focusing on stability.

[QUOTE=Amiga OS;39574559]Its the fastest browser on Android, the interface is horrific tho.[/QUOTE]

True, beats Maxthon which is good looking, but horrible to actually use.
And Dolphin, which is so-and-so.

[Computermaster]

I just wish WebKit would just fucking add native support for APNGs, but no.... "We're gonna wait on the libpng guys to put it in (they never will) instead of doing it ourselves".

[zugu]

[QUOTE=Van-man;39573775]abandon it for ordinary cellphones most likely.[/QUOTE]

Opera Mini is wildly popular, and there's no reason for Opera to abandon it. It also has nothing to do with Webkit.

You're probably confusing it with Opera Mobile, which currently uses Presto and will switch to Webkit. Regular users will probably notice no change after the switch. There's no reason to abandon Opera Mobile either.

[The Baconator]

[QUOTE=Forumaster;39576075]I just wish WebKit would just fucking add native support for APNGs, but no.... "We're gonna wait on the libpng guys to put it in (they never will) instead of doing it ourselves".[/QUOTE]

yeah I hate that I have to use an extension for Chrome to play APNG's because of ideology

[url]https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chrome/6BVLS-kEIic[/url]

[TheDecryptor]

[QUOTE=Forumaster;39576075]I just wish WebKit would just fucking add native support for APNGs, but no.... "We're gonna wait on the libpng guys to put it in (they never will) instead of doing it ourselves".[/QUOTE]

WebKit relies an awful lot on other components to provide the needed functionality, it doesn't (at least when I last checked) actually do HTTP, that's provided by another library (Which actually broke cookie handling on Windows for a while, since only the OS X version of the library supported some cookie attributes)

That ideally shouldn't lead to many issues in practise, but most other software programs would just patch the library to support what they need (Firefox contains copies of libpng and cairo because they patch functionality they need)

Edit: That said, the split was also the same reason Google could take it and easily replace Quartz with Skia, the networking library with theirs that did SPDY, etc.

[Deunan]

I always find it funny how so many people herald this and other stuff as a new coming for the web, completely forgetting the IE6 days and just screaming but WEBKIT is open!!!

When someone behaviour of the members of the webkit foundation is already pretty nasty.