Opera Sings The Final Song With Its Rendering Engine, Decides To Shift To WebKit

Opera is that company that everyone knows about but never really stopped to understand why it is so important. The Norway-based company has always been an ankle-biter, pushing the envelope and calling out the big guys for injustices put upon web developers and Internet surfers. It’s not a sexy position to be in, but Opera has always stood its ground. Today, Opera has announced that it will be slowly abandoning its own web-rendering “Turbo” engine in lieu of WebKit, the core development platform used by Chrome and Safari. In a way, today is a sad day. The company might have fallen on its own sword for the greater good, one final time. By never having the pole position in the “browser war,” Opera had the freedom to try new things and make noise about the issues that really matter, including being able to choose your default browser on the desktop. There was a time when Microsoft PC users had no option of which browser to use; Internet Explorer came bundled with the operating system. It was an anti-trust situation — a monopoly if you will. Opera stood up and fought. How hard has it fought? Here’s a quote from then-CEO of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner, from a 2007 press release which announced Opera’s EU anti-trust complaint against Microsoft: We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them. In addition to promoting the free choice of individual consumers, we are a champion of open Web standards and cross-platform innovation. We cannot rest until we’ve brought fair and equitable options to consumers worldwide. This quote is what Opera stands for, and with today’s announcement, a little bit of Opera died. Von Tetzchner left the company in 2011 and the company became decreasingly aggressive in the years after. When von Tetzchner left, he sent a very strong-worded and poignant email describing how things had fallen apart: It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. From its own blog post, you can tell how hard this decision was to make, as it was something that was better for users and developers, both of whom Opera cares deeply about: On the same day as announcing that Opera has 300 million users,

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