Opera will use Blink

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/

by mathias • 13 years ago

162 41 13 years ago

brucelawson.co.uk

revelation• 13 years ago

“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”

“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to WebKit, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”

“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Gecko, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”

Funny how adaptable these are. If you can't decide, just abstract away.

illicium• 13 years ago

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

camus• 13 years ago

cant beat the system ? go with the flow.

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

Both Gecko and Webkit seem to have made shifts away from providing a baseline for others to work on. Blink appears to be talking as if they're going in the other direction, and I can see how that would fit with Google's corporate goals, though it's not 100% clear what the truth is as it would appear that Blink won't actually be useful without some parts of the wider Chromium project.

Certainly Opera chose Chromium/V8/Blink rather than whatever other alternatives were available, and I can't see that as a bad decision for them.

laumars• 13 years ago

As a long time Opera user, I'm really looking forward to their switch.

zbowling• 13 years ago

Everyone is picking their sides in this battle it seems.

I wonder what chrome for iOS is going to use (given that it's more just a wrapper around UIWebView with some chrome like features).

larrydavid• 13 years ago

Apparently WebKit for iOS according to this tweet that was retweeted by Paul Irish https://twitter.com/firt/status/319568764003819520

gluxon• 13 years ago

Chrome for iOS will be forced to use WebKit as its rendering engine due to Apple's strict policies.

grinich• 13 years ago

Vendor prefixes were like Morrissey’s solo career: on paper, a good idea – but in reality, a horrible mess.

Best line of that blog post :)

pclark• 13 years ago

It's a ridiculous example of "good on paper, not in reality."

All of his albums are good or better, almost all the albums sold well – and the more recent ones like You Are the Quarry are superb. Oh, and he's great to see live solo.

How about almost any rock band reforming? A great idea on paper and almost always a terrible idea. Smashing Pumpkins?

(How about the Euro if you want a good example?)

eru• 13 years ago

The Euro was a mistake on paper. It held out pretty well in the first few years compared to that.

trin_• 13 years ago

not to be too off topic but it seems to me that he's great live when he's not acting all kinds of crazy because two weeks ago someone in the vicinity of the stage ate meat.

themstheones• 13 years ago

Yeah that Morrissey gripe has really been sticking in my craw too.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

My heart sank a little for Opera on reading this news; so it's good to know Opera was in on the secret. If not when they made the decision to adopt WebKit, then at least some point before the Blink news dropped.

mikec3k• 13 years ago

Opera's rendering was never the worst thing about it. The thing I always hated about it was its clunky bizarre UI.

SkyMarshal3• 13 years ago

Funny, its UI was always my #1 reason for using it. MDI + ability to completely hide tabs and Ctrl-Tab through them + Vim keybind scheme = fast workflow and maximized screen real estate.

Even to this day no other browser can match it, though Chrome/ium with a Vim plugin comes close.

Osiris• 13 years ago

I also used Opera because of the UI, but for a different reason. You could move around and change the entire UI and all the keybindings.

For example, I have all my tabs on the left side with thumbnails. Since my screen is widescreen, having the tabs on the left makes a lot more sense than on top.

I also use the built-in Mail client as I really hate going to web pages to check my mail when my browser can aggregate multiple accounts into a single interface and notify me when I get email on any account.

I hope the new Opera supports the same type of customizable UI and mail client or I'll be stuck on 12.15 forever.

adimitrov2• 13 years ago

Erhm, have you tried vimperator/pentadactyl? You know, one of the projects that started this whole "let's bake Vim into the browser"-craze? (They didn't exactly start it, I think, but they sure made it popular.) I can distinctly remember a couple of years ago when I switched from Opera to Firefox precisely because of Vimperator, because it was impossible to replicate the experience fully within Opera. It is still impossible today: Pentadactyl (Vimperator's successor) is much more fully-featured than anything you can do in any other browser, because of Firefox' approach to plugins.

gcb02• 13 years ago

what will decide Opera fates is it's monetization strategy.

for browsers, that's the biggest difference (after quality of product)

Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.

if opera also monetize by selling the user, it will have no chance. at all. On the other hand, selling software or showing ads are also not viable. So i'm very curious to what they are going to do.

btw, what is the current business model of opera to begin with?! do they live only on licensing opera mobile for phone manufacturers?

Edit: the answer for the question at the end is Yes. http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-ope...

dubcanada2• 13 years ago

As with Firefox it's mostly search engine related income. They also sell opera mobile to manufacturers. Opera surprisingly has a lot of users in certain areas like east Europe.

claudius2• 13 years ago

Given that Opera (pre-Chromium, no idea how that turns out) is about the only browser usable on a slow network connection with the others only gradually catching up to server-side compression, caching of websites etc., this shouldn’t be a surprise.

atesti• 13 years ago

>Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.

Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read more about it!

gcb02• 13 years ago

search for stackexchange questions on how to change/disable referrer on chrome. you will see several accepted answers of things that do not work anymore. just be sure to search for some years ago.

from top of my mind, the command line option. the chorme:network-setting(sic) thing. the compile option flag

also, everytime i mention it people ask for source (on this forum where hardly there's time for any discussion!) and once i collected all the commits, but it's on my hell-banned account @gcb. feel free to dig that comment out if you like.

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

This is quickly turning into the tech version of Game of Thrones.

stock_toaster3• 13 years ago

Does this mean that Opera wont get sandboxing and "tab isolation"?

My understanding was one of the reasons Google forked as to rip out the webkit2 versions of those things, in favor of their own, which are fairly tightly tied to Chrome.

So either Opera is going to be more "chromey" or...they are going to reimplement those parts? Maybe they already have them (I am not that familiar with Opera these days)?

mtgx• 13 years ago

If something is in Chromium, it will be in Opera. It's as simple as that. And Chromium has tab isolation.

stock_toaster3• 13 years ago

You didn't really answer any of my questions. (EDIT: I guess you did actually answer the first one. Thanks.) You certainly aren't required to, but still.. did you only read the first sentence I wrote?

mortalkastor• 13 years ago

I, somehow, missed the news about the new Blink rendering engine and thought this was about Opera supporting the <blink> tag. Phew.

yohui• 13 years ago

So, by moving to Blink, Opera loses <blink>.

I guess those nostalgic for the 90s shall have to rely on Firefox, inheritor of Netscape's mantle.

abcd_f• 13 years ago

Looks like Opera is lining itself up for a little acquisition.

qompiler• 13 years ago

More like obsoletion by not differentiating and competing against Google's spyware browser chrome. Instead they opt for a weak and lazy approach, it's just a matter of time now.

mikevm• 13 years ago

I used to use Opera for many years, and IMHO it was almost always the best browser around feature and speed-wise. The only thing holding it back was the rendering engine.

I ended up making the switch to Chrome when Opera 12 came out and was too buggy for my taste (it was the last straw). It took a while to make Chrome feel Opera-ish, but I still miss Opera from time to time, you know, because of the little things.

One thing I wish Chrome had is the ability to select hyperlinks. Opera would let you click and hold the mouse cursor anywhere on a hyperlinked text and select it. If you try the same in Chrome, it will try to drag & drop the link instead of starting a selection. In fact, sometimes it gets really tricky to try to select hyperlinked text.

relix• 13 years ago

You might already know this, but Chrome automatically selects hyperlinked text when you right-click it. You're not able to select a part of it, but if you want to copy just the text, all of it, you can right-click any link, and then choose "Copy", right under "Copy link address".

aj700• 13 years ago

So this is a fork of webkit? Does Safari get stuck with some incompatible because different engine? Apple can/will join blink too? How will it display the >blink< taglement? It's like Google are saying, "thanks for all the stuff you did on khtml, now we'll take it from here bub."

Opera will use Blink

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