Opera version: Opera to WebKit arms

Article Introduction: on Opera's WebKit embrace.

February 13, 2013, when we are celebrating the Spring festival, the browser industry has a surprising news: browser manufacturer Opera announced that from this year will make important changes, the future opera platform products will be diverted to adopt WebKit and V8 (Chrome and Safari) Mainly, and gradually abandoned the use of existing based on Presto engine products, that is, opera changed its heart.

The official confirmation is that opera will unveil its first related product at the MWC2013 (World Mobile Communications Conference) at the end of this month: a standalone WebKit Android platform browser, and the individual desktop platform's opera products will be followed up in the following time.

Tips:presto, WebKit and engines

Presto or WebKit, they are all a kind of browser engine, specifically they are web browser typesetting engine, the purpose is to receive the content of the Web page according to the source file requirements display (this process is often called page rendering), We usually see the pictures and pictures of the page is a typesetting engine rendering processing after the appearance. To put it bluntly, when you right-click on any open page and "View the page source code," the large stack of character codes you see is the raw content of the page that was not rendered.

Opera's insistence

Opera, the Norwegian browser company was founded in 1995, (before) has been adhering to the concept of independent research and development, it is they created a mouse gesture, multi-label browsing, page scaling, and many other modern browsers standard features.

Opera, so simple but so powerful

The first opera version was completed in 1995, but the initial publicly released product was the 1996 Opera 2.0 for Windows, when the market leader or Netscape browser. In the following days, with IE sweep opponents, Firefox preemption share and chrome and IE go hand in hand with a few wars, the browser market is constantly shuffling, but opera has always been steady, and even the people are still very impressive.

In the past 20 years, Opera's market share has not been a big fluctuation, if it is made into a chart, there is probably only one line near the horizontal angle. It's just that if opera is on a high level, the reality tells us that opera's share is less than 2%.

Then look at peers, the same as the younger brother of IE since 1998, like a rocket in the general rapid rise quickly swallowed Netscape share, the boss of the position of a sitting is more than 10 years. And the two big Up-and-comer--firefox and Chrome, now get a lot of user recognition, chrome is and IE do not point up and down. So, whether the absolute user number, or relative market share ratio, Opera is far more than these few peers.

If you are also a developer, after so many years of perseverance, their products have not been further development, you will continue to do?

Opera's Problem

According to the official announcement, the number of opera users has now reached 300 million, but the main source is mobile phone users, accounting for more than 3/4 of the number (about 230 million). Opera's mobile phone is mainly divided into opera Mini and opera Mobile Two, of which opera Mini accounted for the vast majority. By the end of 2012, the number of opera Mini users had exceeded 200 million (see figure below, from Opera's official report).

The growth of Opera mini over the past two years

There is no doubt that Opera Mini is a very competitive mobile browser product, but it has some problems.

First, Opera Mini is currently running on low-end handsets and feature phones, and not much on the growing popularity of iOS and Android smartphones. This may be related to the poor support of the mini for modern web page standards, that is, the lack of compatibility. Presumably many friends who have used Opera Mini on Android and iOS have learned that there are often unresolved problems with the pages that need to be logged on, or those that are like waterfall streaming.

Second, compared to Microsoft, Google and other peers, opera is just a small company of thousands of people. Although such a small company made the performance of one of the products (in all kinds of evaluation can see opera ranked before), but only missing the most important part-product promotion. The more interesting part, however, is that opera itself does not seem to be interested in promotion, and has hardly seen any large-scale marketing and promotion for many years. In addition to pre-installed on the phone, the rest of the basic rely on users to spread between each other ...

So, the problem is in front of, with the further popularization of smartphones and their own promotion is not enough, the next few years, Opera Mini will continue the current growth rate?

The advantages and disadvantages of changing the core

The benefits of changing the core

From opera's point of view, with the WebKit core, Opera has the opportunity to enter the iOS platform to win more users. Because Apple's policy does not allow other kernel browsers to run on iOS (more overbearing ...), except Safari uses the WebKit core.

Secondly, opera company originally undertakes the research and development work the technical personnel can liberate from the kernel development and so on project, turns to the browser experience optimization, the core function improvement and so on aspect. We also have reason to believe that the future of opera products will be in the user experience a greater leap. Of course, once the staff surplus, the occurrence of layoffs is inevitable, it is reported that opera has been from the core of the technical Department of the reduction of more than 90 people (most at the end of last year have left).

For a large number of third-party developers, reducing a single kernel means that they will reduce the amount of debugging work and also reduce the likelihood of product compatibility problems.

　　

The main debugging object of Web development in the future

Likely to produce adverse

Opera has turned from a standalone core browser to a Shell browser, which may be frustrating for some loyal users, and may then abandon opera. In the same way, opera's strategic shift is likely to leave some of the collaborators who were originally directed at the Independent core.

For advocating the diversity of the Internet, when opera left, from the four countries to become a tripod, and in the mobile internet means directly to fulfill webkit a single big situation. As for the WebKit will not go after the original IE on the PC on the old way is not known, I hope it does not.

As for the existing opera users, the previous mention of 2/3 is from opera Mini, this part of the user will not be affected by the core, because the future of opera's new core products will not be pushed into their hands. And for other versions of users, most of the browser and other products have a deeper understanding of the WebKit core is not unfamiliar, the transformation of the core will not let them feel confused and uncomfortable. So from the current point of view, opera to take refuge in WebKit impact on the end user is the smallest.

Finally, how opera will develop in the future, is to borrow WebKit Dongfeng development or to become mediocre even finally exit the browser market, let us wait and watch its change.