[QUOTE]The Norwegian software company plans to throw its weight behind the browser engine used by Google and Apple this year instead of developing its own.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Opera Software, an independent voice in the browser market since the 1990s, will dramatically change its strategy this year by adopting the WebKit browser engine used by Safari and Chrome.
The Norwegian company announced the move today and said it will show off the first fruits of the work with a WebKit-based version of its Android browser at the Mobile World Congress show in less than two weeks. But the company will move to WebKit for its desktop browser, too.
A browser engine processes the Web page instructions written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS then renders the results on screens. The engine is increasingly important as the developer world expands from static Web pages to dynamic Web apps.
Opera's chief technology officer, Håkon Wium Lie, described the company's motives for the change in a statement:[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][I]The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need. It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.[/I][/QUOTE]
[url]http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569106-93/opera-embraces-webkit-in-browser-brain-transplant/[/url]
makes sense they'd move to webkit, it's one of the biggest things that makes Chrome so great
They've also said that they won't be making Presto open source, since it would take so much effort. That sucks a bit but I understand, integrating WebKit will be quite some work.
also lol Microsoft will be happy.
If this means better JavaScript support, this can't be bad.