Opera’s switch to WebKit means that there are now only three web rendering engines that web developers should worry about rather than four. Certainly there are proponents to this switch, not least Opera itself, but it wasn’t too long ago that this migration and focus towards WebKit had some people concerned. Microsoft appealed to developers in November last year to avoid making WebKit the new IE6. On the other hand, there are those who are not particularly concerned about this shift as WebKit is open source.
In the Windows Phone Developer blog, Microsoft laid down the methods for making WebKit optimized sites to work properly on Internet Explorer 10. IE10 is a far cry from the days of IE6, being compliant to existing web standards as defined by the W3C. Unfortunately, a large number of developers made sure that their sites are optimized for WebKit by adding WebKit prefixes even when it’s no longer necessary, hence the post by Microsoft.
When Koprol was around, its largest traffic share originated from Opera mini browser, running on feature phones. It didn’t bother Yahoo though, as Koprol co-founder Satya Witoelar told DailySocial, “It was deep down in our backlog, never became a priority. The rest of Yahoo was even less concerned.” As a developer, Witoelar admitted that he “never gotten to optimize for [Opera mini] anyway even though we knew our users were using it”.
Front end developer for Jakarta-based web and app development company Weekend Inc., Deon Sukma Pranindita welcomes the move. “It makes things easy for me. Because Safari, Chrome, and Opera will be the same, I won’t need to do cross-browser checks anymore.” Indeed, it means less work for developers to make sure their websites work properly across different browsers.
“From the technology standpoint, it’s awesome,” he continues. He goes further to add that people might consider using Opera in the long run. “Since Opera will be using Chromium and the V8 Javascript engine, it can be an option as the default browser.
Tees and Gantibaju.com co-founder Aria Rajasa Masna (yes, we’re related) agrees. “This is certainly a good news for web developers as it provides a more consistent platform for the developers to build on. Opera may not account much in terms of percentage but 300 million monthly users is not a small number”.
However, he noted that the need for apps like Opera mini will diminish over time. “When I think about it, the move to WebKit is logical as people are getting much better speeds to access the Internet and Opera’s idea of compressing data to deliver the web faster is getting more and more irrelevant”
Microsoft’s call for greater diversity on the web does fly in the face of its past moves but this is arguably a different Microsoft, one that embraces common web standards rather than pushing its own. One that is facing uncertainty in the shift to mobile computing from the traditional desktop space.
Jeremy Kahn who works for YouTube said this on his blog in January,
To say that a WebKit monoculture is “IE6 all over again” doesn’t really make sense, because WebKit and IE aren’t comparable projects. IE6 tried to be a platform – the thing that apps are built upon – with ActiveX. WebKit is a rendering engine, a single component of many that make up a web browser. WebKit can be implemented into any project that wants to use it.
I don’t love the idea of Web apps that run in only one browser, but I don’t see an issue with apps that support one rendering engine. Focusing on the capabilities of a single rendering engine frees developers up to build great features and not worry about appealing to the lowest common denominator. This freedom is what pushes the Web forward. In a perfect world, you would only only have to write and debug code once. We would be much closer to that reality if all browsers used WebKit for rendering.
Near the end of his post, he postulates a future in which Firefox abandons Gecko in favor of WebKit. He came close. Opera may not be Firefox and it certainly doesn’t have the significance that Firefox has, but it takes away one web engine for developers to worry about.
