Opera recently crossed 300 million users and there is official press release from Opera confirming that – its going to shift from their own Opera Presto engine to Webkit.
Its mentioned in the details that
“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,” says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. “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.”
Opera will be using Chromium as its base and will be contributing to WebKit and Chromium projects. As number of Opera users have increased, now Opera is targeting to get even more users by shifting to WebKit. Opera shift will result in more features and patches to webkit.
Does this affects Web Developers ?
No. Just keep coding the same way you used to do it and that’s all. You are ready for production.
Why is Opera Switching to WebKit ?
The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.
In the Opera Developer Blog there are all the answers to the basic questions which comes to mind as you hear or read that Opera is replacing its Presto Rendering Engine with WebKit.