Opera Confirms It's Betting On WebKit, Chromium

[Akka]

At least on my slow "desire s" opera is faster than all of them.

[locovaca]

Yeah, I was really suprised how quick firefox on android is, I recently switched to it. Scrolling in particular seems way better. however there are a lot of crappy sites out there that serve only webkit optimized code which can be really annoying when using it, and for some reason some sites don't serve it with a mobile layout at all, but do when I use a webkit browser.

I found Firefox better than the built in Browser on both my Phone (Dual Core 1.5 GHz, Android 4.0.4) and Tablet (Tegra2, Android 4.0.3), but Chrome mobile by far faster than Firefox.

[bwat47]

Hardly. Android, at least, lets you install alternative browsers to the integrated/chrome. And quite frankly, the integrated/chrome browser is a worthless piece of crap. The rendering layer on it is SO FRIKKING SLOW that you can't use it for most sites. Firefox on the other hand, which very suitably uses their own GECKO, absolutely flies. Android market shows it as "10,000,000+ downloads", which is the same as for chrome and opera.

I really wouldn't worry too much. Firefox is doing a great job and holding their own in mobile space.

Yeah, I was really suprised how quick firefox on android is, I recently switched to it. Scrolling in particular seems way better. however there are a lot of crappy sites out there that serve only webkit optimized code which can be really annoying when using it, and for some reason some sites don't serve it with a mobile layout at all, but do when I use a webkit browser.

[droidhacker]

And webkit based browser is included on macosx and ios. In ios webkit is the only allowed web engine. If you consider this combined with Android is shipped with webkit as default you could say the situation is at least as bad as it was with ie6 in the market for mobile browsers.

I really hopes Microsoft and Mozilla continues develop there engines.

MS can die.
Mozilla is in it for the long run.
Android built in browser is a horse turd.

[droidhacker]

No.

By moving to webkit they reduce costs and get increased browser compatiblity. Many sites nowadays are optimized for webkit.
This webkit monoculture is getting scary (especially on mobile) and is looking more like all over again IE6.

Hardly. Android, at least, lets you install alternative browsers to the integrated/chrome. And quite frankly, the integrated/chrome browser is a worthless piece of crap. The rendering layer on it is SO FRIKKING SLOW that you can't use it for most sites. Firefox on the other hand, which very suitably uses their own GECKO, absolutely flies. Android market shows it as "10,000,000+ downloads", which is the same as for chrome and opera.

I really wouldn't worry too much. Firefox is doing a great job and holding their own in mobile space.

[Akka]

Although I can see the issue with Web developers only targeting WebKit specific features, and only testing on WebKit browsers, it's hard to compare it to Internet Explorer, which was popular because it was included with the then most popular OS and politics, vs many other OSes using the same open platform, because it works pretty well...

And webkit based browser is included on macosx and ios. In ios webkit is the only allowed web engine. If you consider this combined with Android is shipped with webkit as default you could say the situation is at least as bad as it was with ie6 in the market for mobile browsers.

I really hopes Microsoft and Mozilla continues develop there engines.

[bwat47]

I don't think that lots of browsers sharing the same rendering engine will inherently lead to monoculture, especially with IE and Firefox still commanding a lot of users. There's more to a browser than a rendering engine, especially from a user's perspective.

Its *already* a monoculture on mobile. Mobile web browsers are almost exclusively webkit, many mobile websites serve code only optimized for webkit.

[curaga]

Not on mobile. On mobiles it's all webkit. iOS has safari which uses webkit and apple mandates third party browser's must use the version of webkit that comes installed on iOS, never another engine engine. Android has Chrome or the Stock browser on older versions. Both webkit. Many popular android browsers like Dolphin are webkit.

Opera Mini still had substantial market share IIRC.

[Luke_Wolf]

I actually have somewhat mixed feelings on this. Ultimately what's going on here is we've got an open standard de facto (Webkit) beginning to take over in some respects from an open standard de jure (Standardized HTML). Going to either side has it's positives and negatives, However... even if we do develop a monoculture, a competitor can come along and break it up (particularly given webkit is opensource) as firefox did with IE, and as LLVM is doing with GCC. That said I feel less bad about monoculture when whatever is being standardized on implementation-wise is properly modular, and thus components of it can easily be replaced.

[nerdopolis]

While there are plenty of things wrong with monoculture in theory, are comparisons to the IE6 era fair given that Webkit is (afaik) currently the most advanced engine? (my main browser isn't even webkit based btw)

IMHO I think it's quite different different
IE6 was a closed source browser, meant to run on only one platform (windows), that did not adhere to web standards well, and supported features that are not cross platform, like Active X controls.

WebKit is an open source, cross platform browser framework, that adheres pretty well to the standards as far as I know...

Although I can see the issue with Web developers only targeting WebKit specific features, and only testing on WebKit browsers, it's hard to compare it to Internet Explorer, which was popular because it was included with the then most popular OS and politics, vs many other OSes using the same open platform, because it works pretty well...