Opera to Switch to WebKit

Opera press release:

To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

“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.”

Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla sees this as a “sad day for the web”, but I think it’s more like a sad day for Mozilla. The simple truth is that WebKit is a better engine than Opera’s own Presto, and this move should make Opera’s browsers — particularly the mobile ones — better.

★ Wednesday, 13 February 2013