Android and iOS only.

Now here is something you won’t see every single day. In an effort to stay relevant in the mobile space, it looks like Opera is open to all kinds of crazy ideas and one of them was just revealed. As learned by Pocket-lint, Norwegian browser maker has dropped their own rendering engine (codenamed Presto), which powers a wide range of products (Opera Mobile, Opera Desktop, Opera Mini, Opera Wii Browser and their TV Web Browser), in favor of WebKit, which since became a standard among developers.



Now, before everyone freaks out, they are not phasing out any of their current products (at least yet) and instead, a WebKit based web browser will launch as a separate product called “Opera Ice”.

So what is Ice? According to Opera’s CEO, it’s a reboot of your average web browser, it has no buttons, no menus, and all you see is content. Sounds familiar? That’s because it’s pretty much identical to Microsoft’s own vision seen in Windows Phone, Internet Explorer and Windows 8 style apps: focus on the content. Everything is gesture based and that’s what Opera is all about.

Why go this route? According to Opera’s CEO, “Opera mini is great, but it is not a fully-fledged offering like Chrome or Safari. There are too many sites it doesn’t work with.”

“We need to focus on getting strong products out on iOS and Android. These are the two leading platforms we will focus on… They are the ones phones are being sold for,” Lars Boilesen said.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on Ice, you will be happy to know that it’s coming as soon as next month.

Hopefully, they will drop Presto and replace it with WebKit on their desktop platform too, without sacrificing any of the current Opera features. One can only dream, eh?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this]