http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit
Farewell Presto, you served us well...
I've been an Opera fan since around 2005. At that time, other browsers really sucked for power users. I discovered tabs in Opera, then the low-memory footprint, and decided to call it quits with Maxthon or whatever default browser I was using at the time.
My best memories of Opera are of the 9.xx line, especially 9.2x which was heavily customized for my needs. It was just THE perfect browser: fast, full-featured and extremely stable. I had at some point over 800 tabs on my 2GB machine. It was unthinkable of. All of these tabs were loaded in memory, i.e. when I switched to them, they showed up instantly.
When I made the switch to 10.x, I was really worried with the many changes they'd done that made it slower and gave less acceptable web site layouts. I switched back to 9.64 or something, and stayed with it for many more months.
Then they went for 10.50 which was an improvement, so I started using it. Version 11, which came out in 2011, was better in every respect. They added stackable tabs, which was something I'd been wanting for a long time. Unfortunately, that feature was buggy, and everytime I quit Opera, I would fear that launching it would present me with a flat list of tabs. They eventually fixed that bug, but not before v12 I think.
Still, these were some good days too. I really liked version 11.
And then Opera 12 came out... And was an awful nest of bugs. I'd never seen that. They'd introduced internally 4 major things:
1- tabs loaded in separate process, so that one tab crashing wouldn't crash the others,
2- Flash ran in its own independent process. Same as above.
3- A 64-bit version, allowing for Opera to use more than 3.5GB of Ram.
4- hardware acceleration, not very noticeable except for one thing: fonts were now rendered using Direct2D, i.e. veeeery smooth job.
So... I had to make the switch. As it turned out,
(1) was useless because Opera had become FAR more prone to random crashes, even with less than 100 tabs. This is something that's crucial to me, and eventually drove me away from it. It was always crash-prone since version 10, but v11 was an improvement on that. v12 was a step down. In the real world, (1) never showed its strength to me, because when tabs crashed, they'd probably crash everything.
(2) actually worked, but it turned out that my Opera crashes were only partly due to Flash misbehaving. So, again, a step down...
(3) was horrible. Because of my tendency to use hundreds of tabs, Opera 64 would use absolutely all of my RAM. It usually isn't a problem, because when you launch another program, it'll just reallocate the extra RAM to it. But in the real world, this never happened, or not fast enough. I had a countless number of "Not enough memory, you should close Opera.exe" error messages showing up during my sleep (I mostly keep my PC on 24/24), and sometimes with some major crashes when I'd turn my screen back on. Yay... So, eventually I reluctantly came back to Opera 32, and guess what...? Much better. Still, Opera would usually crash within a few hours of launching it, and that's with ~100 tabs on. I never dared try with more tabs... It just wasn't there any longer. My Opera fanatism had reached an end.
I think I made the switch to Firefox around last summer, but found it to be so incredibly slow. I loved it when they implemented lazy loading tabs, though. i.e. Firefox no longer tries to load all tabs at startup, it will only load a tab when you activate it. Which effectively makes it currently the best browser for power users with 500+ tabs.
Then I started using Chrome more and more. I always hated its "no geeky stuff" approach, more especially the fact that it removed the vertical tabs feature, which was THE very best Chrome feature. Actually, after trying it out in Chrome (and Firefox's Tree Tabs add-on), I discovered that Opera allowed me to do the same (it has a side tab, and there's a Window feature in it that must be added manually, but then you get a tree-style list that works really well.)
So, what made me switch to Chrome then...?
One word: Sidewise.
It's a plugin that opens a new window on the left side, and attempts to emulate what vertical tabs did. But the developer is hard at work on it, and added many sensible features. For one, you can stack tabs in a tree style. Secondly, you can 'hibernate' a tab, just like in Firefox (using an add-on). Thirdly, and that's for the best -- when Chrome crashes (which it ALSO does on a daily basis, sometimes more), the tab list never gets lost, and it usually reopens my many tabs in hibernating mode, meaning I have the benefits of a fast browser (not many tabs) while still having my tabs available if I choose so. I can also, similarly to Opera (but not Firefox!) search my tabs quickly by entering part of the tab name or URL in an input box at the top. For instance, if I want to clean up all of my local install test tabs, I can just type 'unwedge' in the input text, and then middle-click on all of the tabs that get filtered. It just WORKS.
So... Opera is dropping Presto (only keeping it, from what I understand, for Opera Mini, where pages are generated on their local servers and then dispatched to requesters), and using WebKit.
What does it mean for us? Well, Wedge compatibility will be made easier. I'm a bit sad because I was also very proud about our compatibility with Opera -- I did 90% of my overall testing on it, after all... But it'll be good not to have to focus on so many engines.
Myself, I may very well come back to Opera. If the Sidewide plugin works on it (as it should), then I'll definitely give the new Opera a try. And if it doesn't work, I'll come back to test it on every new version. Because Opera deserves it. It deserves having advocates. Even though version 12 was a failure, it still doesn't mean they should be forgotten for what they did for so many years.
You may ask, why use WebKit and not Gecko..? After all, Opera has always been friends with the Mozilla foundation, and they served as moral support on their fight against the H264 format. But that war was lost last year, and worst of all -- Firefox started losing market shares. Opera knows what it means. It lost market shares to Chrome, too. I think it's simply a matter of Opera finally being realistic (in their decision to dump Presto for another rendering engine), and thus, if they want to be realistic all the way, the only engine they can rely on is WebKit, not Gecko. Because it's no longer about making your point and winning a way; it's about focusing on what they're really best at: user experience and new innovative features. WebKit is now the leader in rendering innovation. Opera will help them stay on that road.
I think it's a good decision that they made. Opera indeed had a superior engine (Presto's HTML, Vega's layout and Carakan's JS), but I don't know of many people who used it for *that*. They used Opera because it was the best user experience they could have -- everything could be modified in the interface. And that's what I mostly miss with Firefox and Chrome. Using plugins for everything isn't always practical. Opera had it all. Now it has even more. I can't wait to try it...
Farewell Presto, you served us well...
I've been an Opera fan since around 2005. At that time, other browsers really sucked for power users. I discovered tabs in Opera, then the low-memory footprint, and decided to call it quits with Maxthon or whatever default browser I was using at the time.
My best memories of Opera are of the 9.xx line, especially 9.2x which was heavily customized for my needs. It was just THE perfect browser: fast, full-featured and extremely stable. I had at some point over 800 tabs on my 2GB machine. It was unthinkable of. All of these tabs were loaded in memory, i.e. when I switched to them, they showed up instantly.
When I made the switch to 10.x, I was really worried with the many changes they'd done that made it slower and gave less acceptable web site layouts. I switched back to 9.64 or something, and stayed with it for many more months.
Then they went for 10.50 which was an improvement, so I started using it. Version 11, which came out in 2011, was better in every respect. They added stackable tabs, which was something I'd been wanting for a long time. Unfortunately, that feature was buggy, and everytime I quit Opera, I would fear that launching it would present me with a flat list of tabs. They eventually fixed that bug, but not before v12 I think.
Still, these were some good days too. I really liked version 11.
And then Opera 12 came out... And was an awful nest of bugs. I'd never seen that. They'd introduced internally 4 major things:
1- tabs loaded in separate process, so that one tab crashing wouldn't crash the others,
2- Flash ran in its own independent process. Same as above.
3- A 64-bit version, allowing for Opera to use more than 3.5GB of Ram.
4- hardware acceleration, not very noticeable except for one thing: fonts were now rendered using Direct2D, i.e. veeeery smooth job.
So... I had to make the switch. As it turned out,
(1) was useless because Opera had become FAR more prone to random crashes, even with less than 100 tabs. This is something that's crucial to me, and eventually drove me away from it. It was always crash-prone since version 10, but v11 was an improvement on that. v12 was a step down. In the real world, (1) never showed its strength to me, because when tabs crashed, they'd probably crash everything.
(2) actually worked, but it turned out that my Opera crashes were only partly due to Flash misbehaving. So, again, a step down...
(3) was horrible. Because of my tendency to use hundreds of tabs, Opera 64 would use absolutely all of my RAM. It usually isn't a problem, because when you launch another program, it'll just reallocate the extra RAM to it. But in the real world, this never happened, or not fast enough. I had a countless number of "Not enough memory, you should close Opera.exe" error messages showing up during my sleep (I mostly keep my PC on 24/24), and sometimes with some major crashes when I'd turn my screen back on. Yay... So, eventually I reluctantly came back to Opera 32, and guess what...? Much better. Still, Opera would usually crash within a few hours of launching it, and that's with ~100 tabs on. I never dared try with more tabs... It just wasn't there any longer. My Opera fanatism had reached an end.
I think I made the switch to Firefox around last summer, but found it to be so incredibly slow. I loved it when they implemented lazy loading tabs, though. i.e. Firefox no longer tries to load all tabs at startup, it will only load a tab when you activate it. Which effectively makes it currently the best browser for power users with 500+ tabs.
Then I started using Chrome more and more. I always hated its "no geeky stuff" approach, more especially the fact that it removed the vertical tabs feature, which was THE very best Chrome feature. Actually, after trying it out in Chrome (and Firefox's Tree Tabs add-on), I discovered that Opera allowed me to do the same (it has a side tab, and there's a Window feature in it that must be added manually, but then you get a tree-style list that works really well.)
So, what made me switch to Chrome then...?
One word: Sidewise.
It's a plugin that opens a new window on the left side, and attempts to emulate what vertical tabs did. But the developer is hard at work on it, and added many sensible features. For one, you can stack tabs in a tree style. Secondly, you can 'hibernate' a tab, just like in Firefox (using an add-on). Thirdly, and that's for the best -- when Chrome crashes (which it ALSO does on a daily basis, sometimes more), the tab list never gets lost, and it usually reopens my many tabs in hibernating mode, meaning I have the benefits of a fast browser (not many tabs) while still having my tabs available if I choose so. I can also, similarly to Opera (but not Firefox!) search my tabs quickly by entering part of the tab name or URL in an input box at the top. For instance, if I want to clean up all of my local install test tabs, I can just type 'unwedge' in the input text, and then middle-click on all of the tabs that get filtered. It just WORKS.
So... Opera is dropping Presto (only keeping it, from what I understand, for Opera Mini, where pages are generated on their local servers and then dispatched to requesters), and using WebKit.
What does it mean for us? Well, Wedge compatibility will be made easier. I'm a bit sad because I was also very proud about our compatibility with Opera -- I did 90% of my overall testing on it, after all... But it'll be good not to have to focus on so many engines.
Myself, I may very well come back to Opera. If the Sidewide plugin works on it (as it should), then I'll definitely give the new Opera a try. And if it doesn't work, I'll come back to test it on every new version. Because Opera deserves it. It deserves having advocates. Even though version 12 was a failure, it still doesn't mean they should be forgotten for what they did for so many years.
You may ask, why use WebKit and not Gecko..? After all, Opera has always been friends with the Mozilla foundation, and they served as moral support on their fight against the H264 format. But that war was lost last year, and worst of all -- Firefox started losing market shares. Opera knows what it means. It lost market shares to Chrome, too. I think it's simply a matter of Opera finally being realistic (in their decision to dump Presto for another rendering engine), and thus, if they want to be realistic all the way, the only engine they can rely on is WebKit, not Gecko. Because it's no longer about making your point and winning a way; it's about focusing on what they're really best at: user experience and new innovative features. WebKit is now the leader in rendering innovation. Opera will help them stay on that road.
I think it's a good decision that they made. Opera indeed had a superior engine (Presto's HTML, Vega's layout and Carakan's JS), but I don't know of many people who used it for *that*. They used Opera because it was the best user experience they could have -- everything could be modified in the interface. And that's what I mostly miss with Firefox and Chrome. Using plugins for everything isn't always practical. Opera had it all. Now it has even more. I can't wait to try it...
