Opera has announced that it would stop using its in-house rendering engine in favor of the open-source Webkit project, a web page rendering engine created by Apple and used in numerous browsers including Google Chrome and Safari (of course). Opera says that it has 300 million active users, so this change will make an impact on quite a nice chunk of internet page traffic when implemented.While website compatibility has gotten much better in recent years, those working on edgy websites with HTML5 and CSS3 support can still find themselves struggling to get some features work. for example responsive designs may require support for downloading images only when needed and different browsers have different behaviour, which makes it difficult to find one code path that works for everyone. Building many code paths defies the purpose of building web apps if they need tweaking for each browser family.
Opera will also contribute to the Webkit project, and the company will still retain some unique value with Opera Turbo, a web content compressor used at the server level. This is a technology that wireless carriers have been licensing for some time. We’ve all tested Opera at some point, but which browser are you using now? I’m mainly on Chrome and Firefox.