Opera Moves to WebKit, Hits 300 Mil. Users
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For Free
opera moves to webkit
opera has
announced
that all of their new products will now use
webkit
as the rendering agent and
v8
for the javascript engine.
what does this mean for developers?

web developers shouldn't be affected much, but there are two things to keep in mind:
-
chromium doesn't have built-in support for for h.264 or mp3 codecs. check media support with
html canplaytype
, but the simplest method is to encode codecs in both webm and h.264 with two <source> elements.
-
the window.opera object will not exist in the new chromium-based opera.
what does this mean for users?
in short, opera users will notice better site compatibility--especially on mobile sites, which are usually only tested on webkit browsers. the switch to webkit has been described as a purely "under the hood" change, so users shouldn't notice much difference.
300 million users

the future
opera's first webkit-based product will be for smartphones and will be announced at the
mobile world congress
in barcelona at the end of this month.
Opera (web browser)
WebKit
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Comments