The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need. It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.Håkon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera Software • Discussing why the company is gradually moving to Webkit, after spending years building their own engine. This is a big deal for Web designers, as it makes Webkit (already used in Chrome and Safari) an even more dominant platform. ”The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry,” Wium Lie noted.
Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most popular browser
Filed under that didn’t take long. Chrome’s first public, stable release was in December 2008. The first version of Internet Explorer, 1995.
In 2002-2003, IE controlled about 95% of the browser market.
More info via The Next Web.
Image via StatCounter.
One thought on this: It seems like we’re reaching a point where we’re going to start seeing an interesting effect on browser standardization. That is, Chrome specifically (and Webkit in general) by and large has much wider suport for modern internet standards, at a deficit to other browsers that haven’t kept up as quickly. Due to the inconsistent standards, there’s been a need to create “browser prefixes” in CSS, some of which only work in Chrome. A similar effect happened around 1997, where Netscape and IE were launching feature after feature without any care as to standards. Now, while Chrome is better about implementing this, are we going to see Webkit make every other browser a second-class citizen online? (Granted, we wouldn’t be opposed to seeing every browser company adopt Webkit and work on the same open-source platform.)
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