Presto Is Dead; Long Live Opera! | Webmonkey

Opera software announced this morning that it is dumping its homegrown Presto rendering engine in favor of the increasingly ubiquitous WebKit rendering engine.

For all new products Opera will use WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine, mirroring what you’ll find in Google’s Chrome browser. Apple’s Safari also uses WebKit, though it has its own JavaScript engine. […]

Indeed, while Opera’s official announcement is vague about the reasons for the switch, it doesn’t take a soothsayer to know that the reason is mobile. One influencing factor is no doubt the fact that Apple’s iOS only allows third-party web browsers if they use the built-in WebKit rendering engine.

It’s a sad day and I’d bet it has everything to do with the last line in the last paragraph above.

Opera Presto was top-notch in the rendering arena and I could always count on pages displaying as they should when it came to Opera testing.

#webdev #opera