Opera formally adopts WebKit as its Web browsers reach 300 million users
Opera has announced that its range of Web browsers is now being used by 300 million people each month to navigate the Internet across mobile phones, PCs, tablets and more. The Norwegian firm is marking the milestone …
Context & Ripple Effects
Opera’s mobile footprint had already expanded from one million Opera Mini downloads in 2007 to nearly 40 million monthly Opera Mini users in 2009. The reported 300 million monthly users makes its formal adoption of WebKit consequential not just as an engineering choice, but as a larger audience moving onto an engine also used by Safari.
First-order effects
- Opera’s browser users and Web developers gain a more common rendering target as Opera aligns its browsers with WebKit.
- WebKit’s developer community gains Opera’s 300 million-user distribution footprint, extending the practical reach of the engine’s existing web-platform work.
Second-order effects
- Sites that already test against Safari’s WebKit implementation have a stronger incentive to treat WebKit behavior as a baseline for Opera compatibility.
- Competing browser-engine teams face greater pressure to match WebKit-supported web features and developer tooling as Opera adds scale to that engine’s audience.
Third-order effects
- The move points toward browser competition shifting away from distinct rendering engines and toward differentiation in product features, distribution and user experience atop a smaller set of shared web runtimes.
The trend: Browser vendors are consolidating around shared rendering engines, making engine compatibility and developer-targeting decisions increasingly concentrated.