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Why Blink??
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Obviously presto belongs now to Opera ASA.
But I believe (and I hope) that someone in the Vivaldi team still has the original Opera sources accessible in a way or another, not to copy them but to look what they did to implement a particular function, and to reimplement it on the new browser.
Surely not a straightforward operation, but the beginning looks more than promising.
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@Gwen-Dragon:
Obviously presto belongs now to Opera ASA
The rights for Opera Browser always belonged to Opera ASA since over 10 years, not only now.
That's obvious.
What I mean is that as a matter of fact Opera ASA is not the same company it was 5 years ago.
A different company, with different aims, lead by different people, who produce a different browser, based on a different engine.
Just the name is still the same.
@Gwen-Dragon:
Dont hope for illegal actions.
No one is talking of illegal actions.
Reading a piece of code, understanding what it does, and reimplementing its functions, w/o copy and paste actions, hardly can be considered illegal, even reverse engineering is not illegal (at least in Europe).
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@Gwen-Dragon:
What I mean is that as a matter of fact Opera ASA is not the same company it was 5 years ago.
Yes, companies change. Not their proterties.
I'm sure you have understood what I mean even if you are nitpicking on my words.
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@Gwen-Dragon:
Do you really talk about disassembling or source code?
No I don't
The Opera cource code is not free and not in hands of Vivaldi.
I just believe that theory and real life aren't always the same think.
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@Gwen-Dragon:
Sorry, its not easy for me to figure out what you mean. But my knowledge in native english not very fluent.
May be i myiuderstood something.
I apologogize for my dumbness.
My english i good enough for programming and handbook reading, but may be less usable for human interaction.My English is not fluent too.
But what I mean is very simple.
I don't know a single programmer who sold a SW (including its source) that hasn't retained somewhere a copy of the source (or just the part he worked on) just for personal use/ knowledge/pleasure.
And personal usage includes reading it to remember what the programmer did maybe 5 years before, to get some hints when writing a NEW and ORIGINAL program.
No one will ever tell me "you are right" on this, for obvious reasons, but in the real world this is a common (and understandable) practice.
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Why Blink? It's the fastest-growing, best-supported browser engine, as well as being open-source and fully developed for cross-platform use.
Why not Presto? Because it's proprietary and owned by someone else, and because some fifteen years experience taught everyone that using an engine no one else uses means no one will test in or write for your engine and you will be plagued with site compatibility issues forever.
Why not Mozilla? Declining market share, poor cross-platform readiness.
Why not some other self-written proprietary engine? See the remarks on Presto above.
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using an engine no one else uses means no one will test in or write for your engine and you will be plagued with site compatibility issues forever.
This^^
Opera devoted silly amounts of resources to make sure web sites were rendered properly by Presto. And it was not working very well. Internet is globalizing, and niche browsers with proprietary (read low market share) engines have no chance to grow user base because of site compatibility problems. And nobody can force developers to test their websites on browsers with low market share. -
It might also be useful to remember that Opera developed and released its first proprietary Presto engine at a point (2003) in the 'browser wars' when the landscape was quite different from now. The major players by then were IE, Mozilla, a fast-fading Netscape, and Opera. Chrome did not even exist. Everyone was groping around trying to incorporate standards, rendering techniques, interfaces, and trying just to get pages to render accurately. IE was most users' defacto browser, by simple virtue of being default on all Windows installations (and being attacked for monopolistic practices in that regard). Mozilla was the hot, fast-rising star. Building your own rendering engine was a natural, though complex, way to go to incorporate creative features and be able to export your browser to multiple OS platforms. Website coders were writing site code with different execution paths for different browser engines, and getting them to test your engine against their code became a major issue… as it remains today. And it was in that realm where Presto experienced its greatest problems; browser sniffing at times led to browser blocking.
Now, in 2015, the browser world has turned upside down in comparison with the era when Presto was first released. Chrome is the market leader; Firefox is slowly fading, IE is no longer a monopoly. Social websites, multimedia-laden webpages, plus multiple open browser tabs are the orders of the day for browsing. Website coding for just a selected few engines and the resulting economics have forced browser makers to choose between just those few site-popular rendering engines to obtain maximum website compatibility. The result has been to cluster nearly all browsers around a very small number of rendering engines (Gecko, Webkit/Blink, and Trident), building custom interfaces with them as the mechanism for differentiating the browser in the marketplace. What made sense in 2003 may make little economic sense 12 years later.
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And nobody can force developers to test their websites on browsers with low market share.
While it is true that nobody can force developers to test at all, the market share assumption is not quite correct, simply because there is more than only the Desktop.
Opera Mobile and Opera Mini used the Presto engine too (Mini on the servers to pre-render the content for the Mini "client"), and their market share was always higher than that of the iPhone - but still everyone tested with the iPhone but not with Opera.
Until about 2 years ago Opera for Phones had more daily users than iPhones were sold in all series combined - who does still (wants to) surf with an iPhone of the previous generation? Apple quite inflated the number of sold iPhones over the years by combining the sales of all series while never saying how many of the old are still in use. Perceived or published numbers about usage or market share are not necessarily hard facts, especially if they come from Apple -
@Ronaldlees:
He he hee. FOSS/OSS people think all code is open source. Anyway, we don't know about any legal agreements the two companies may have between themselves. I suspect part of the motivation for using Chromiumized Webkit/Blink internals is to distance the company from any idea that even lightly suggests code mingling. There exists a "poisoning by review" concept, in both the proprietary and OSS worlds. This concept is entirely foreign to the blindly patriotic hordes of OSS. Let me quickly insert here that I love OSS. To each his own. Understand the difference.
I don like to label myself and I don't like to be labeled by others.
That said what I wrote has nothing to do with the FOSS culture, has to do with pragmatism. Understand the difference
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Ppafflick moved this topic from Vivaldi for Windows on
