Opera will use Blink

I used to use Opera for many years, and IMHO it was almost always the best browser around feature and speed-wise. The only thing holding it back was the rendering engine.<p>I ended up making the switch to Chrome when Opera 12 came out and was too buggy for my taste (it was the last straw). It took a while to make Chrome feel Opera-ish, but I still miss Opera from time to time, you know, because of the little things.<p>One thing I wish Chrome had is the ability to select hyperlinks. Opera would let you click and hold the mouse cursor anywhere on a hyperlinked text and select it. If you try the same in Chrome, it will try to drag &#38; drop the link instead of starting a selection. In fact, sometimes it gets really tricky to try to select hyperlinked text.

<i>Vendor prefixes were like Morrissey’s solo career: on paper, a good idea – but in reality, a horrible mess.</i><p>Best line of that blog post :)

This is quickly turning into the tech version of Game of Thrones.

I, somehow, missed the news about the new Blink rendering engine and thought this was about Opera supporting the &#60;blink&#62; tag. Phew.

Opera's rendering was never the worst thing about it. The thing I always hated about it was its clunky bizarre UI.

Everyone is picking their sides in this battle it seems.<p>I wonder what chrome for iOS is going to use (given that it's more just a wrapper around UIWebView with some chrome like features).

what will decide Opera fates is it's monetization strategy.<p>for browsers, that's the biggest difference (after quality of product)<p>Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.<p>if opera also monetize by selling the user, it will have no chance. at all. On the other hand, selling software or showing ads are also not viable. So i'm very curious to what they are going to do.<p>btw, what is the current business model of opera to begin with?! do they live only on licensing opera mobile for phone manufacturers?<p>Edit: the answer for the question at the end is Yes. <a href="http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-opera-make-money-aka-our-most-asked-question-ever" rel="nofollow">http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-ope...</a>

My heart sank a little for Opera on reading this news; so it's good to know Opera was in on the secret. If not when they made the decision to adopt WebKit, then at least some point before the Blink news dropped.

<i>“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”</i><p><i>“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to WebKit, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”</i><p><i>“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Gecko, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”</i><p>Funny how adaptable these are. If you can't decide, just abstract away.

As a long time Opera user, I'm really looking forward to their switch.

Does this mean that Opera wont get sandboxing and "tab isolation"?<p>My understanding was one of the reasons Google forked as to rip out the webkit2 versions of those things, in favor of their own, which are fairly tightly tied to Chrome.<p>So either Opera is going to be more "chromey" or...they are going to reimplement those parts? Maybe they already have them (I am not that familiar with Opera these days)?

So this is a fork of webkit? Does Safari get stuck with some incompatible because different engine? Apple can/will join blink too? How will it display the &#62;blink&#60; taglement? It's like Google are saying, "thanks for all the stuff you did on khtml, now we'll take it from here bub."

Looks like Opera is lining itself up for a little acquisition.