{"id":2465,"date":"2013-02-20T00:48:32","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T13:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2013-02-20T00:48:32","modified_gmt":"2013-02-19T13:48:32","slug":"exit-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2013\/02\/20\/exit-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Exit Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opera — apparently tired of having relevance and influence over the evolution of the web — is quitting the “build a browser” business in order to join the “customize someone else’s browser” business<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This has triggered much discussion of monocultures and the health of the web.\u00a0 In comparison, I haven’t seen much discussion about how it’s simply an awful decision for Opera itself.\u00a0 Well, not until I read the comment thread of this Ars Technica story<\/a> (about lay-offs), some of which nicely covered several aspects I’ve been thinking about.<\/p>\n

First: the announcement said that “this is primarily an ‘under the hood’ change”.\u00a0 I’m skeptical about that. \u00a0tigas commented:<\/a><\/p>\n

I await the first beta of OperaKit. Rumored casualties are Carakan (confirmed), Dragonfly (confirmed), Fit-to-Width\/Seamless Zoom and Single-Column\/Small Screen mode (all but confirmed, those depend on Presto’s dynamic layout code), Instant “Back” and “Undo” (probably too dependent on Presto to be able to be retrofitted to WebKit), IRC and Torrent clients<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This doesn’t surprise me.\u00a0 Rendering and JS engines are not identical black boxes.\u00a0 They’re complex things with very large surface areas.\u00a0 Switching them must be invasive and have a plethora of knock-on effects. I don’t know if Opera has announced a release date for their first customized version of Chromium, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it took longer to get working than many people expect.\u00a0 Especially if they just laid off a bunch of developers, including numerous old-timers.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, I suspect that new version will feel and behave dramatically<\/em> differently to the old version, and that’s going to annoy a lot of their users.\u00a0 For example, fluxtatic commented:<\/a><\/p>\n

Crap…if Dragonfly goes, I’ll shut automatic updates off and stay with version 12.x until it gets too dangerous. I’ll have to hope in the meantime all the little things that make Opera better stick around or come back (tab restore, right-click to open new tab on the tab bar, automatic restoration of last session, being able to save sessions, etc, etc.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Think of those loyal Opera fans who would defend it to the death in every discussion about browsers on the web.\u00a0 Do you think they’ll have the same passion for a customized Chromium?\u00a0 lithiumfrost summed it up best:<\/a><\/p>\n

Personally, I think Opera can now disappear. Their announcement made for a suicide note in my mind, and I can’t imagine what kind of value-add they can offer now that they threw in the towel on their own layout engine and Javascript compiler. A lot of the value that Opera offered was in it’s small download size and very fast layout engine along with very good standards compliance. They innovated, and they really did so with Presto.<\/p>\n

Now that they are becoming just another Chrome-clone, I can’t see the point in continuing to use it. Why? I might as well download Chrome. They’re doing the actual browser work now, and have a lot more experience and expertise in the development.<\/p>\n

I’d like to see them open source Presto now, but I my guess is that they probably would have announced that with the change if that’s the way they were leaning. What a waste. Farewell Opera; it’s been a good ride.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What a waste, indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opera — apparently tired of having relevance and influence over the evolution of the web — is quitting the “build a browser” business in order to join the “customize someone else’s browser” business. This has triggered much discussion of monocultures and the health of the web.\u00a0 In comparison, I haven’t seen much discussion about how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4562],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}