CSS3

Opera Software have announced that they are abandoning their proprietary Presto rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit rendering engine, for future versions of their mobile and desktop web browsers.

Writing on the Opera Developer News blog, Bruce Lawson, Web Evangelist for Opera, offers the following explanation for the switch:

When we first began, back in 1995, we had to roll our own rendering engine in order to compete against the Netscape and Internet Explorer to drive web standards, and thus the web forward. When we started the spec that is now called “HTML5”, our goal was a specification that would greatly enhance interoperability across the web.

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

A post on Bruce’s personal blog elaborates further on the reasoning behind the switch:

Opera’s Presto engine was a means to an end; a means for a small, European browser company to challenge the dominance of companies who, at that time, hoped to “win” the web through embracing, extending and extinguishing web standards.

Presto showed that it was possible to make a better browser while supporting standards. Other vendors have followed this path; the world has changed.

These days, web standards aren’t a differentiator between browsers. Excellent standards support is a given in modern browsers. Attempting to compete on standards support is like opening a restaurant and putting a sign in the window saying “All our chefs wash their hands before handling food”.

Rendering engines are now highly interoperable – largely due to the progress commonly known as “HTML5″, begun by Opera in 2004, then joined by Mozilla, in order to protect the web from proprietary platforms, keep it open and promote interoperability.

It seems to me that WebKit simply isn’t the same as the competitors against which we fought, and its level of standards support and pace of development match those that Opera aspires to.

The first Opera product due to incorporate the WebKit rendering engine is their new mobile web browser for the Android platform, due to be unveiled at the Mobile Congress event in Barcelona this summer. An iOS version should follow shortly after, and their desktop browser products will also make the switch.

To date, reaction from developers has been mixed. On the negative side, a number of arguments have been put forward. Writing on this personal blog, Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan offers the following opinion:

The news about Opera switching to Webkit is disappointing. It’s a sad day for the Web, since I thought highly of their Presto engine and their Web standards work. Their impact on Web standards will be dramatically reduced, especially where they want to do something differently to Apple and Google. The big loss for the Web is a further decrease in the diversity of browser engines, especially on mobile devices. This means that our work at Mozilla simultaneously becomes more important — we now have one of the three viable browser engines, instead of one of the four, and engine diversity is already critically endangered — and more difficult, because this will strengthen the Webkit mobile monoculture and make it even harder for us to promote Web standards over “coding to Webkit”.

Some people are wondering whether engine diversity really matters. “Webkit is open source so if everyone worked together on it and shipped it, would that be so bad?” Yes. Web standards would lose all significance and standards processes would be superceded by Webkit project decisions and politics. Webkit bugs would become the standard: there would be no way for developers to test on multiple engines to determine whether an unexpected behavior is a bug or intended. It wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome — victory of a closed-source engine would be worse — but it would be a far cry from the open Web goals we’ve been striving for.

On the positive side, a number of internet heavyweights have come forward in support of the decision, including John Resig, creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. Writing on his personal blog, John offers the following opinion:

The news has just come out that Opera is switching all of their browsers (both mobile and desktop) to use WebKit (specifically, Chromium). I’ve seen a lot of gnashing of teeth on Twitter and I feel like I can respond because I use to feel the same way back in 2008-2009. However this is 2013 and the Chrome/Chromium team has made it obvious that any form of stagnation or lack of innovation does not need to occur when using WebKit. In fact it possibly gives you the ability to accelerate your development, spending less time worrying about implementing common standards. I would argue that WebKit (a common framework for implementing the standards-compatible portion of a web browser) is exactly like jQuery (a common framework for implementing a DOM standards-compatible experience in a web page) at this point.

John also addresses some of the negative comments/arguments raised by others.

So what do you think of this news? Is it the end of web standards as we know them? Does it really matter at all? Add your comments below.