Do not kill Presto, one of few excellent browser-engines and the most unique one! Open sources of Presto engine!





Opera has announced that they will be dropping their rendering engine Presto, in favor of Webkit. This knocks the number of major rendering engines down to three. Opera will also be adopting the Chromium V8 Javascript engine.

Browser Wars, the game

A monoculture is usually better in the short term. It’s a better allocation of resources (everyone working on the same thing!) If you want to write a rich web app that works today (ie, on the browsers of today), it’s much better.

But the web is a platform. Platforms are different beasts.

Imagine it’s an all-WebKit mobile web. Just follow the incentives to figure out what will happen.

Preventing innovation: a gang of hackers makes a new browser that utilizes the 100 cores in 2018-era laptops perfectly evenly, unlike existing browsers that mostly burn one CPU per tab. It’s a ground-up rewrite, and they do heroic work to support 99% of the websites out there. Make that 98%; webkit just shipped a new feature and everybody immediately started using it in production websites (why not?). Whoops, down to 90%; there was a webkit bug that was too gross to work around and would break the threading model. Wtf? 80%? What just happened? Ship it, quick, before it drops more!

The group of hackers gives up and starts a job board/social network site for pet birds, specializing in security exploit developers. They call it “Polly Want a Cracker?”