Opera to use WebKit: Thoughts?

[James]

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!

Article here on Opera Dev News: http://bit.ly/Y1UHO6

[tomrogers123]

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.

[tomrogers123]

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.](http://www.cuttherope.ie/dev/ “”) and they are really trying to shed their old reputation with developers.

[KeithPickering]

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.

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