Opera Changes Its Mind, Will Use Blink Instead Of WebKit

By | April 4, 2013


Opera Changes Its Mind, Will Use Blink Instead Of WebKitTune in tomorrow when Opera switches to Trident.

It looks like Apple is about to lose a yet another contributor, at least in the long term. After Google’s announcement that they will be moving away from WebKit, Opera Software announced that they too will contribute and use Blink to power their web browsers.

According to Opera’s Bruce Lawson, “a lot of people were worried that there would be less diversity on the Web once Opera Presto was retired, and the forking of WebKit into Blink restores that balance.”.

Guess we will have to wait and see but as far as user experience goes, anything is better than Presto.

Update: Looks like Opera knew about Blink all along.

[Thanks, Blake]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (38)

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  1. Mehran says:

    Go home Opera, you are drunk!

  2. SonicGD says:

    What? Opera switch to Chromium, not to pure webkit. So when Chromium move to Blink, Opera automaticly do it also. They not changed their mind, you should think before write.

  3. NoName says:

    “It’s great to be able to talk publicly about Blink”

    This means they already knew this internally. Which means it has been the plan all along. They didn’t change their minds, they just couldn’t speak public about it.

    • jayjam says:

      Even if they hadn’t known, nothing really changes for Opera. They’re still using Chromium and whatever comes with it. And it’s not like Chromium is getting a new engine overnight. The first Blink version will just be Webkit with another name.

      Regardless, claiming that Opera has changed its mind is just wrong.

  4. Hallvord R M Steen says:

    “as far as user experience goes, anything is better than Presto”
    I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that. Actually I don’t understand the point at all. In what way did Presto cause a sub-par user experience?

    • FavBrowser says:

      Scroll lag and broken sites come to my mind when I think about Presto.

      • Mehran says:

        Bad, but genuine

        • lol says:

          I only have scrolling issues with the 2 last Opera versions on Facebook but it hapens only With hardware acceleration enabled..

      • jayjam says:

        Instant back (with no form reload), proper text wrapping, doesn’t crap out with 200 tabs, etc. Presto certainly had several advantages.

    • Rafael says:

      Don’t give importance for this, this blog went from web browser news to a public personal whining diary of the author about web browsers.

    • Countless issues in countless websites, to the point all elements in a given site DONT work!! Im talking from experience, it is really annoying when the whole page becomes like a static pic and sometimes reloading will fix it, sometimes stop wasting your time and get another browser to do the job.

      And it happens just too very often to take it anymore.

  5. yepi ammad says:

    why opera forcing me 64 bit opera, why don’t they give option to download 32 bit opera ?

  6. ilovelife says:

    This could be the big jump or could be the big fail for OPERA. Just need to wait

    • jayjam says:

      It’s not even a jump. The big jump was Webkit. Blink is just Webkit with a new name at this point.

      • Rafael says:

        The big jump is that now Apple doesn’t control the game and they’ll be able to remove the bloat from WebKit to make Blink. *-*

  7. lol says:

    “anything is beter than Presto”
    Really? YOu are Drunk.

  8. MacVities says:

    Vygantas is really embarrassing himself now. Opera have only ever stated they were usiing Chromium base, which AT THE TIME was Webkit, and this is NOW Blink.

    Quite clearly Opera knew Google’s plans, but weren’t able to say anything, and idiots like yourself just filled in the gaps and made yourself look rather silly.

    You really out to pack this in, you are an embarrassment,. You fanboyism whilst originally hilarious is now embarrassing.