Opera joins Chrome & Safari in using Webkit for Web-browsing

[TrevC]

In a mono-culture you have no predators thus no evolution.

There's a big difference between a standard and an implementation. If you only have one implementation (e.g. WebKit, or more specifically, WebCore), developers will undoubtedly start depending on certain quirks of that implementation. You reach a point where these quirks can't be changed, otherwise half the web will stop working. Having multiple rendering engines means these quirks are more likely to be fixed, and not relied upon.

Now, everyone switching to WebKit probably wouldn't matter much in the short term, but that seems awfully short-sighted. We don't need a single rendering engine, but new standards bodies. I'd be perfectly okay with WHATWG stepping into this role. What you're describing is "innovation" in its weakest form. It's basically incremental improvement, rather than real innovation, and I can't help but think that's the wrong approach.

Real innovation is far more drastic and disruptive. When it comes along, it often meets heavy resistance from those who are entrenched, especially when these people may not benefit from it. This is true within open source projects too. Unorthodox ideas will often be brutally crushed, even if the benefits they provide are immense. It's impossible to say if WebKit will continue in a direction most agree with in 5-10 years. Sure, one could always fork if that happens, but then how do you get that into the hands of your users? Needless to say, it isn't a compelling argument for a single rendering engine either.

There's other reasons to be concerned with WebKit becoming the defacto implementation, as well, that have more to do with its architecture, and not simply the rendering engine. For example, if you want parallelism, WebKit is a non-starter (too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions). Also, nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could happen.

I'll agree that if there is to be a rendering engine mono-culture, it might as well be open source, but that in itself guarantees nothing. Apple still has quite a bit of control over the project, and it's mostly developed by Apple, Google and RIM (full disclaimer: I work for one of those companies). There's nothing preventing them from getting a bit heavy-handed just because it's open source.

You may not have convinced me just yet, especially in regards to a webkit-monoculture leading to a lack of real innovation. However, I do feel compelled to give it some more thought.

WHATWG as a true standards governing body that everyone strictly adhered to and participated in would be great too.

These are all much larger issues. In the short term, I'm quite happy to finally say farewell to Presto
In fairness to Opera, their dev tools were very good. Especially the CSS-profiler that Chrome had to catch up with.

mostly developed by Apple, Google and RIM (full disclaimer: I work for one of those companies)

Is it RIM, is it RIM? Poor company takes so much abuse these days. BB10 looks really promising.

 

[rellek]

Well, there were dirty hacks in WebKit just to pass Acid3.
see: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/03/27/the-missed-opportunity-of-acid-3/
Did someone care? Well it's open source and those hacks got part of a public build.

What's the problem with having a single render engine? They have a bug and web designers use CSS hacks to have their pages displayed correctly. At some point, everyone does that. Once WebKit would consider fixing this, it would break everything. So they are not fixing that and boom: we're one step away from web standards. I don't think it's actually important who 'owns' one engine. This can always happen.

Look, it's the same with MSIE 6. It wasn't exactly a bad browser when it was released. Well, keep in mind, it was released in 2001 and was the current version for 5+ years without ANY changes on the engine. And that was the actual problem. And Microsoft's opinion to have 90+% market share so they don't have to continue development. Because why should they? If everyones obeys one's rules, why should one change?

 

[Jason]

You may not have convinced me just yet, especially in regards to a webkit-monoculture leading to a lack of real innovation. However, I do feel compelled to give it some more thought.

WHATWG as a true standards governing body that everyone strictly adhered to and participated in would be great too.

These are all much larger issues. In the short term, I'm quite happy to finally say farewell to Presto
In fairness to Opera, their dev tools were very good. Especially the CSS-profiler that Chrome had to catch up with.


Is it RIM, is it RIM? Poor company takes so much abuse these days. BB10 looks really promising.

Fair enough, I can at least appreciate the civil discourse . I don't work for RIM, no, but aspects of BB10 do look promising -- shame it lacks an ecosystem though.

 

[digitalpoint]

Was screwing around with my new Google Analytics percentage area charter tool thingie... and seeing browser marketshare reminded me of this thread...

Is Opera even really used by many anymore? I mean it never was hugely popular, but on my site, I've never seen it peak above 2.5% marketshare and has just slowly been declining (most recently 1.5%).

7 years ago, Internet Explorer & Firefox had a 95.1% marketshare on my site... IE is all the way down to 10.3% now. Safari is only 1.2% behind IE now. lol Firefox marketshare peaked at 56.6% right about when Chrome came out (now Chrome is the dominate browser on my site @ 43.0%).

With Opera becoming a webkit browser, that puts Webkit browsers at 58.0% of my traffic.

 

[TrevC]

Was screwing around with my new Google Analytics percentage area charter tool thingie... and seeing browser marketshare reminded me of this thread...

Is Opera even really used by many anymore? I mean it never was hugely popular, but on my site, I've never seen it peak above 2.5% marketshare and has just slowly been declining (most recently 1.5%).

7 years ago, Internet Explorer & Firefox had a 95.1% marketshare on my site... IE is all the way down to 10.3% now. Safari is only 1.2% behind IE now. lol Firefox marketshare peaked at 56.6% right about when Chrome came out (now Chrome is the dominate browser on my site @ 43.0%).

With Opera becoming a webkit browser, that puts Webkit browsers at 58.0% of my traffic.

Our forum is sitting at 1.01% Opera users.

However, you can count on one of those Opera users complaining the loudest when their edge-case engine bugs outs. Webkit/trident/gecko seem to do just fine in any Presto trouble spots.

It's amusing how many blog comment sections and forums have the omnipresent "Doesn't work in Opera!" comment.