Opera begins shift to WebKit engine as browser users top 300M

Opera Software, the company behind the popular mobile browser of the same name, confirmed it will scrap its Presto rendering engine in favor of WebKit, a move to increase its competitiveness on Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android and Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS.

Last month, Pocket-lint published a leaked internal Opera video indicating the firm's forthcoming ICE browser for iOS will run on the WebKit engine, which also powers Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. Opera formally announced the change Wednesday, stating it will make a "gradual transition" to WebKit in order "to provide a leading browser on Android and iOS." Opera additionally will support V8 as its JavaScript engine and will contribute to the open-source Chromium framework project.

"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," said Opera Software CTO 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 plans to embrace WebKit for most of its browsers for smartphones and computers. It will preview its first WebKit-powered Android browser later this month at the Mobile World Congress 2013 event.

In related news, Opera announced that 300 million users access its browsers each month across all platforms. More than 200 million consumers access its signature Opera Mini mobile browser, which compresses up to 90 percent of data to improve speed and reduce costs; the firm also offers the full-featured Opera Mobile.

For more:
- read this release
- read this Opera Developer News blog post
- read this TechCrunch article

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