Opera, one of the most innovative browsers of its time, is switching to WebKit engine as well as Chromium for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers. The company is making this switch to provide better browsing experience on Android and iOS.
Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, says:
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.
Lie then talks about the fact that makes open source technologies superior to any closed source technologies:
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.
It's unfortunate that Opera is still a proprietary (non-free) browser so it doesn't enjoy the same reputation that Chromium or Firefox have. I hope Opera will one day go open source so the larger open source community can benefit from their work and in return make Opera better.
Swapnil Bhartiya
A free software fund-a-mental-ist and Charles Bukowski fan, Swapnil also writes fiction and tries to find cracks in a proprietary company's 'paper armours'. He is a big movie buff and prefers listening to music at such high volumes that he's gone partially deaf when it comes to identifying anything positive about proprietary companies. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+ & Facebook. You can write to him on editor at muktware dot com
