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Opera Goes for WebKit

Opera Goes for WebKit

Opera is a Norwegian browser founded in 1994 with the aim of making the Web a more equal and universal experience. Last February 13, 2013, the company announced to its 300 million browser users that they were going to make a “gradual transition to the WebKit engine”, as the Opera’s spokesperson announced in their press release on Wednesday. Opera will also base future software for both smartphones and computers on Chromium, Google’s open-source project.

The reason they gave for this radical decision was that, quoting the words of Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, “the shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry.”

However, many users and experts in the area question the weight of the previously mentioned factor in the decision making process, especially considering that Opera had remained firm by their own custom rendering engine since its creation nineteen years ago. They argue that the real reason behind the innovations is the growing WebKit monoculture which pervades the mobile Web.

The news indirectly affects the Mozilla browser as well, which now finds itself quite lonely in the job of trying to enforce Web standards over just choosing WebKite. The Web Standards Project is a coalition to help ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for everybody (a project of which Opera used to be a strong defender).

If one analyzes the decision from an economic point of view and remembers Opera is, after all, a money-making company, the approach seems very sensible: it would both reduce costs and make it easier for Opera to grow within the smartphones and tablet market. However, many users feel that the reduction in diversity will always eventually lead to a decline in the quality of the products, in detriment of the users.

Sources
Opera
Arstechnica
OS News
Webstandards Project

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