Why Opera is adopting open-sourced WebKit engine and Chromium framework?

Posted: 4:00 am, February 13, 2013 by Amarendra Bhushan

In order to claim that bigger piece…. The Norwegian software company Opera has confirmed that it’s Web browsers is now being used by 300 million people each month across mobile phones, PCs, tablets and more.

Struggled to keep its 5th-place ranking in the browser usage, company is also adopting to the open-sourced WebKit engine and the Chromium framework used by Safari and Chrome. Its first WebKit product is likely to be a smartphone browser for Android.

Why Opera is adopting is open-sourced WebKit engine and Chromium framework?

Well it has no choice…. WebKit is a smart move.

Opera’s move from Presto engine technology to WebKit, the bulk of the browser market will be reduced to using three primary engines: WebKit, Microsoft’s Trident, and Mozilla’s Gecko.

Opera Chief Technology Officer Håkon Wium Lie said: “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,”

Writing on the Opera developer blog, Bruce Lawson said “Consumers will initially notice better site compatibility, especially with mobile-facing sites — many of which have only been tested in WebKit browsers.”

Although ditching its in-house Presto browser engine raises the possibility of engineering layoffs, Opera spokeswoman Zara Lauder took an optimistic tone when asked about it.

“We have never had more people at Opera working on our products than right now, and we look forward to contributing to WebKit,” Lauder said. “This change has been some time in the making, and all hands are now hard at work on making the best possible browser for our users.”

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Posted in: BUSINESS

Tags: Browsers,Desktop,Gecko,ICE,Mobile,Opera,Opera Mini,Opera software,Presto,rendering,Software,Trident,WebKit

About the author: Amarendra Bhushan

A journalist, author and serial entrepreneur- Founder and CEO of CEOWORLD Magazine and Lucentbyte Media Technologies LTD. (amar@ceoworld.biz)

Trial and Error

monopoly is never good. Thank god for Firefox.
Rachael King

And Trident was open source right…
Elnino Cinta

william …. It’s not a monopoly. Anyone can contribute to WebKit and anyone can make a WebKit browsers for pretty much every single platform.
william davis

i feel kind of sad, it paves the way for webkit to have a monopoly on mobile browsers.
Qiang wang

Ahh… Finally!

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