Opera passa a Webkit e abbandona Presto
Ebbene si, l’annuncio è stato dato direttamente da Opera. Il popolare browser da sempre leader nell’innovazione (tante delle funzionalità attualmente presenti su Chrome e Firefox sono nate in casa Opera) ha deciso di lasciare il passo e smettere di sviluppare un proprio engine HTML Presto per utilizzare Webkit per tutti i suoi browser, sia desktop che mobile.
Il team che si occupa di Presto passerà dunque a contribuire attivamente a Webkit.
Di seguito il testo dell’annuncio
Opera Software today announced reaching the milestone of 300 million
monthly users across all its browser products on phones, tablets, TVs
and computers.“300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes
on,” says Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. “On the final stretch
up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in
user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear
to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.”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.”The first
look at what Opera is bringing to the smartphone game as a result of
this switch will be shown at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this
month, with a preview of its upcoming browser for Android.“Opera
is also experimenting with WebKit in several research and development
projects, and many of you got a peek of one of them, codenamed ‘ICE’,
last month. As a leading innovator in browsers, we are very excited that
ICE received such great buzz. We will provide more information about
ICE and other exciting R&D projects in the future, but as we are
also really proud of our new browser on Android and our Opera Web Pass
operator offering, those products will be the main focus at MWC,” says
Wium Lie. “The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be
dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions
that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the
features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry.”“300
million is a bonanza big number, and we are certain this move will help
us grow even more – and make our products even better,” says Boilesen.“Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future.”
