They're abandoning their own Presto engine and moving to WebKit: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/hey-presto-opera-switches-to-webkit/

2/13/2013 9:34:45 PM

2/13/2013 10:58:27 PM

2/13/2013 11:11:53 PM

only time i used opera was to force my touchpad order through on the hp website

2/13/2013 11:33:02 PM

k it's not so bad, I mean WebKit is open-source and Opera will now prolly help WebKit implement some emerging standards that Presto was at the forefront of, like HTML5 Forms and multi-column layout: http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/

also WebKit more generally out-Opera'd Opera: http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/opera-and-webkit-a-personal-perspective/


BTW they're more specifically going to base Opera on Chromium, so they'll also have the advantage of the V8 engine (and Carakan was seriously falling behind in recent years); IDK how the skinning engine will change, but I hope that the old Opera UI tweaks still work and that Opera can still bring along the integrated IRC, BitTorrent, e-mail, and Turbo clients (although the experience of Widgets and Unite calls that into question) and the ability to run old Opera extensions.

2/14/2013 12:43:54 AM

why should i care about this? give me good reasons.

2/14/2013 9:39:31 AM

client side css override, actual good mouse gestures, speed and low memory utilization were why I used opera so long. It was also the first tabbed browser and the first with session state saved

2/14/2013 10:02:50 AM

Actually, most browsers allow the user to specify a custom stylesheet: IE lets you specify a file in Internet Options, Firefox allows you to alter the display of Web content with userContent.css (and even the user interface with userChrome.css), albeit in a hard-to-find part of the profile, and Chrome lets you do the same thing, but with Custom.css in a difficult-to-find hardcoded location; Opera is different in allowing multiple userCSS files, as long as they're all in one directory.

I also liked the ability to add random userJS files to a particular directory and watch them get used right away, or remove them and watch their effects go away, unlike the current system in Chrome and Scriptish/Greasemonkey (for Firefox) that requires you to use the browser's own UI to install or uninstall UserScripts (and Chrome even treats them like full-blown extensions, so you need to dig among the extensions page to uninstall them).

Oh, there's also the venerated URL Filter File; it was like built-in AdBlock without the overhead of an extension, and it actually blocked top-level document navigation (although its syntax was less expressive).

2/14/2013 10:39:33 AM

2/14/2013 1:21:43 PM