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Opera To Abandon Presto In Favour Of Webkit

Posted February 18 2013

By Admin

The Norwegian software developer Opera announced that it will abandon its home grown rendering engine Presto in favour of the open source WebKit rendering engine.

From now onwards Opera will use WebKit as its rendering engine, along with V8 as its JavaScript engine for almost all products. This will make Opera’s rendering result somewhat identical to Google Chrome.

Apple’s Safari also uses WebKit, though it has its own JavaScript engine.

Announced on Opera Developer Blog, Opera’s Bruce Lawson revealed the first WebKit-based Opera browser intended for smart phones which will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month.

Opera may not have had enjoyed a large market share which is only 2 to 4 percent, however the company’s two mobile browsers Opera Mini and Opera Mobile have been the most used mobile browsers on the web.

Hopefully the WebKit community will give a warm welcome and get a valuable benefit from the developers who brought us some of the most awesome features that any browser have such as speed dial, mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, Turbo mode, and an uncompromising support for web standards that made Opera one of the first browsers to pass both the ACID 2 and ACID 3 page-rendering tests. For its part Opera is starting off on the right foot, offering up code that brings Presto-quality support for the CSS Multi-column Layout Module to WebKit.