Opera has announced that it would stop developing its own Presto rendering engine and will use WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine, built using the Chromium browser as one of its components. Specifically, Opera says that it will base future software on Chromium. Another bad thing about it is that they're not going to release Presto open-source.
My lovely Presto has just died! Seriously, this is insane.
Well, opera was and is a niche browser. Webkit is a pretty good rendering engine, and you can see that chrome renders really fast - so I only hope that it will improve Opera. Perhaps it won't be a niche browser in the future. Might try it out again after that, but I will stick to chrome until it has really convinced me.
you can see that chrome renders really fast - so I only hope that it will improve Opera
Nobody really used Opera because of rendering. Opera 12.10 even works on Windows 98 with some system tweaks. Also, Chromium and its WebKit are CPU eaters. Chromium, full of extensions with 20 tabs opened needs so much CPU, that Opera with 100 opened tabs will never use. So it really makes me wonder if Opera will say the same being Chromium-based browser. Although as developer, I can only say that it's slightly easier to develop web-sites for WebKit, than for Gecko & Presto.
It's one less competing browser. It's the loss of imperial immediacy. What happens now is called annexation. If we'll have only one rendering engine it won't only stop evolving, but no one will contribute to it. Especially when it's open-source like Chromium. Now, when we can only see WebKit (as leader), Gecko & Trident on the main scene, things can go really weird. I can only hope that Firefox won't move to WebKit. Trident will never be closed, it can only die - because Bill Gates himself said that IE is the best browser. Firefox could certainly try to move to WebKit, but apart from a large number of pain in the neck, they will not get much - too many laces on XUL (and for example XPCOM)
SD is apparently unable to see the light in a unified platform. I second DC's post. It makes sense to at least have a standard for browser-based, and if not a standard, then a de facto standard will do the job perfectly fine. Viva la consistence!
I clearly see the benefits, even for me, as a a developer - slightly easier development, for example. No more cross-browser fixes, etc. But there are still lots of problems about Chromium (and with WebKit, generally), like highlighting a link. It also makes me wonder what will happen with Dragonfly and Opera UI.
I meant highlighting a link in your browser (to copy it, for example). Chromium fails at it. Yes, you're right here, since Opera will contribute to WebKit, more problems are gonna be fixed. In the same time, take a look at Linux kernel development. Everyone contributes to it, but everyone has their own "Linux". I hope it will not happen with WebKit, although I've already seen a lot of browsers based on Chromium.
take a look at Linux kernel development. Everyone contributes to it, but everyone has their own "Linux".
The kernel is quite constant, there's just a shitload of distros. Distros don't matter, since they are all the same in the core. It's a bit like saying "Look at HTML, everybody made their own webpages instead of using the exact same one everywhere!"
There's a time for standards and a time for creativity.