Interesting move. Kinda had it coming considering only 1.9% of the web as of January 2013 used Opera. But what are the developers thoughts on this? Surely we can't just drop the vendor prefix -o- "just like that". In my opinion, it's an awkward move but a superb change for me. Your window.opera functions will no longer work, but realistically you shouldn't target vendors with JS anyway. Unless you're using Modernizr. But, I defiantly think it is a great move. Safari, Chrome and Opera all on WebKit. It will be easier in respect as Opera devs are working along side the Chromium project. Still, only 1.9% of the web are using Opera, but is this it? Considering at least 50% of the internet today is dominated by WekKit-based browsers (Such as OSX, iOS, Chrome, Safari etc. and including cool little browsers such as iCab, Omniweb, Shiira, and Epiphany) I defiantly think it's a good move. It's just gonna be a pain to move all the extensions over, however Opera have a announced a conversion tool in the works.
What are other peoples thoughts?
PS, statistics are based on W3 stats. Not entirely the best reliable source!
I wasn't actually aware of this but I think it can only be good for web development. The more consistent rendering becomes, the better. Opera deserves to become more popular as it has some great features - like the fact that the developer tools display pseudo elements in the DOM - and the team work hard to innovate - if memory serves me correctly, they were first with some of the new input types in HTML. As for window.opera being broken, this is not a good thing to be using anyway as you said. If this forces us to think through cross-browser quirks carefully (and thus not leaning on the convenient crutch of application-based conditional loading) then I'm all for it.
Maybe a headache to start off with though if client sites that have already been paid for start to behave oddly for some users.
That's just it. WebKit is practically, if not the best rendering engine out there in the commercial world of web. Although smooth scrolling is only a experimental feature and not a standard thing with WebKit, I certainly agree with you on the move. Opera were in fact the start of the standards we see today.
Defiantly interested to see the future of other browsers such as Firefox and IE. Although IE have implemented HTML5 & CSS3 features to the brim in IE10, I wonder what their next move will be.
I think it stands to reason that we could (and arguably doing so already) see a complete role reversal where IE actually begins to lead the feature implementation race. I mean, we have already seen interesting proof-of-concept stuff from Microsoft such as an entirely in-browser version of Cut the Rope. and they are really trying to shed their old reputation with developers.
Opera is the slowest piece of garbage I've ever used, and I'm literally clueless as to why people like it. So yeah, I'm glad that they're moving over to webkit.
Interesting move. Kinda had it coming considering only 1.9% of the web as of January 2013 used Opera. But what are the developers thoughts on this? Surely we can't just drop the vendor prefix
-o-"just like that". In my opinion, it's an awkward move but a superb change for me. Yourwindow.operafunctions will no longer work, but realistically you shouldn't target vendors with JS anyway. Unless you're using Modernizr. But, I defiantly think it is a great move. Safari, Chrome and Opera all on WebKit. It will be easier in respect as Opera devs are working along side the Chromium project. Still, only 1.9% of the web are using Opera, but is this it? Considering at least 50% of the internet today is dominated by WekKit-based browsers (Such as OSX, iOS, Chrome, Safari etc. and including cool little browsers such as iCab, Omniweb, Shiira, and Epiphany) I defiantly think it's a good move. It's just gonna be a pain to move all the extensions over, however Opera have a announced a conversion tool in the works.What are other peoples thoughts? PS, statistics are based on W3 stats. Not entirely the best reliable source!
Article here on Opera Dev News: http://bit.ly/Y1UHO6
I wasn't actually aware of this but I think it can only be good for web development. The more consistent rendering becomes, the better. Opera deserves to become more popular as it has some great features - like the fact that the developer tools display pseudo elements in the DOM - and the team work hard to innovate - if memory serves me correctly, they were first with some of the new input types in HTML. As for
window.operabeing broken, this is not a good thing to be using anyway as you said. If this forces us to think through cross-browser quirks carefully (and thus not leaning on the convenient crutch of application-based conditional loading) then I'm all for it.Maybe a headache to start off with though if client sites that have already been paid for start to behave oddly for some users.
That's just it. WebKit is practically, if not the best rendering engine out there in the commercial world of web. Although smooth scrolling is only a experimental feature and not a standard thing with WebKit, I certainly agree with you on the move. Opera were in fact the start of the standards we see today.
Here is an interesting article on the move. http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/
Defiantly interested to see the future of other browsers such as Firefox and IE. Although IE have implemented HTML5 & CSS3 features to the brim in IE10, I wonder what their next move will be.
I think it stands to reason that we could (and arguably doing so already) see a complete role reversal where IE actually begins to lead the feature implementation race. I mean, we have already seen interesting proof-of-concept stuff from Microsoft such as an entirely in-browser version of Cut the Rope. and they are really trying to shed their old reputation with developers.
Opera is the slowest piece of garbage I've ever used, and I'm literally clueless as to why people like it. So yeah, I'm glad that they're moving over to webkit.