Making a stand among the web and mobile browsers, Opera touches a new milestone reaching 300 million monthly users across all its browser products on phones, tablets, TVs and computers. Adding to the celebration and to gear up for the next generation browser battle, Opera will be shifting to open source WebKit engine, as well as Chromium ditching its own Presto for its upcoming browsers for smartphones and computers.
“300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on. On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market. Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future.” said Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software on official blog.
WebKit engine is already know to power the Google Chrome and Safari browsers . “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.”
Earlier Opera showcased the experiment webkit project codenamed ‘ICE’, which features all-touch gesture based browser control system. Opera will be previewing its upcoming browser developed for Android which uses the WebKit engine at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month.