Opera adopting Webkit engine
After announcing the milestone of reaching 300 million users, CEO Lars Boilesen has decided to stop developing their own rendering engine and adopt Webkit- the rendering ending that Apple and Google use in their respective browsers.
“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,” says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. “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.”
The process will start with the mobile edition of browsers as Opera for the iPhone and Android devices makes a gradual transition while Chromium, the branch of Webkit that Google is developing will be used for desktop versions of the Opera browser.
Are you one of the 300 million users of Opera that is excited or disappointed over this change?
