skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, website compatibility is one of the major issues of Opera. The second thing is lack of support in terms of add-ons and such, but I don't see how they can help that. This might just get more people to use Opera as their desktop browser though. Every time I test a website on Opera, I'm like "I should really give this browser a chance". But every time that I try it for an evening, I notice the shortcomings in support (by websites, add-ons, etc.).

Back then I was used to having fifteen add-ons in Firefox, but after Mozilla made one bad choice after another, I moved to Chrome and live by Adblock Plus and some own userscripts and bookmarklets now. Perhaps Opera isn't as much of a culture shock anymore to use, especially with the Webkit engine.

I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine. It has a smaller userbase I think, but does that automatically mean it wouldn't be the right choice? They don't say a word about this.

All in all, I do applaud the change. It's a hard step to take after you've been working on your own engine for years, but they've done it, and it will probably add a lot in terms of website support.
Why would anybody who doesn't know how Git works would want to use GitHub?
To add to OP's usability gripes, as a new Xbox owner (bought it over Christmas) with a grand total of 4 bundled games and a Kinect:

Kinect menu interaction needs to be improved. Kinect Adventures has it right for its age group, showing a full mirror image of the user on its menus, but Kinect Sports is a mess of deeply nested menus, which my 4 year old, who has been able to navigate an iPad since age 2, can't get right yet. Dance Central uses an un-intuitive swipe from right-to-left, that took a while for me to figure out. I suppose controllerless UX is still in its infancy, but still...

Then we get to the sign in system: the sign-in, sign-out is very confusing, and in Kinect Sports, almost useless - I never know who the second player is going to be. I also have a very weak mental model of how Kinect ID facial recognition works -at what point are you signed into a game?

I still don't really understand XBox Live vs XBox Live Gold. Why should I subscribe for utility apps I already have, or to use a clunky web browser?

Oh yes, and no NTFS support, on a Microsoft platform.
Great news for Opera. Unfortunately this is another reason for developers to ignore other browsers and use proprietary webkit prefixes.
As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain untouched for years.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misu...
I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.
Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you, because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a different UI of the browser.

And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.
I realise that on certain metrics public transport is better.

None of that matters. Who decides which transport to use? Humans. What measurement do they use? It's clearly not litres of diesel per passenger-kilometre.

"Humanity" is pretty good at economising scarce resources. But people are pretty clearly prepared to pay enormous costs (fuel, parking space, commute time) to have a private car. Arguing with revealed preferences doesn't change them.
Re: releases; GiHub used to have a cool feature that was removed* (and I deeply miss): they removed the file uploads.

* https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

You know, the code distribution can be different to the code you have in the repo (git archive != python setup.py sdist).

The uploads functionality wasn't perfect (I had to make the dist package, upload it), but it did work for me.
There are many cities without a lot of cars that work very well (even if they have some).

The large cities this is true for, that I have some personal experience with, are London and Amsterdam.

The difference is that they are also swarming with public transport and/or bikes.

The following is not an uncommon sight in your typical Dutch city: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

And in London using the tube / subway is just the fastest way from any A to B anywhere in and around the center (unless you can't walk half a mile), and the most convenient and care-free one (no finding a parking spot, no road taxes, no insurance, no fueling it up, no having it repaired if it breaks down, no winter tires, no ice scraping, no cleaning it,...).
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Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML layout engine was/is pretty much fine.
That's why I put location in there. One of my number one goals right now is to be able to live within walking distance of friends and families. It's currently ranked way above income. I bike to work during the warm months and use public transportation during the cold ones. It does have the disadvantage that I won't take jobs that aren't within range of public transportation or biking, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The solution to this would be easy. Have a few narrow roads on which only special cars can transit (such as emergency vehicles), and permit a few (public?) taxis to circulate. The price to take one of these should be many times more what we pay today. So you want to do shopping? Fine, you should be able to afford the taxi.
Your Dad and Nan kinda have a point.

After the 1960s came the stagflation of the 1970s.

The late 1930s saw World War 2.

I suspect that my generation will look on the 90s as a benign time, and we would be right.

The Cold War was over, the War on Terror was yet to come, the Internet was taking off and economic growth in most countries was uninterrupted for almost the whole decade.
Considering they are switching to an open source rendering engine, I think there is likelihood they would have open-sourced presto already if that was possible. I suspect that like much proprietary software, there are too many licensed dependencies.

It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone would be significant.
> and git is pretty old.

No, it's not! It's released in 2005.
People who dislike patents can still want the state to help "lone wolf" garage-based inventors.

Patents are a state enforced monopoly given to the invetor in exchange for information disclosure. Now that's all nice and all, but I for one would like that the state worked on proportionality when giving out aid. Is 20 years needed for you? whats your cost analysis? whats your business model? Do you expect you will need 20 years until your invention pays for the invested time and money? Would 18 years work? or say 12? maybe even 5 years would be enough? This are questions I think the patent officer should ask before giving out state enforced monopolies for 20 years.

To answer your question of alternatives to patents. Have you looked into foundations that gives out money to people working on inventions for blind people?

If not and the state is really the only entity that can give you enough to support the inventing process, then for everyone sake, please write your patent application in such a way that it actually do count as information disclosure.
Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while everyone else in the office uses chrome.
This is a good thing for everyone that uses Webkit browsers.
Google? 40% female in eng? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to find that number online since it's embarrassingly low, and they guard it jealously even internally.

In 4.5 years on 3 different projects (SRE team, dev team, different dev team), I was all alone. I should tally up all of the names of my coworkers and see just how it worked out. People came and went but it was always guys replacing guys.
This is a very moot issue at this point. The $850+ million the Live division is now minting every quarter guarantees a strong profit base going forward for the Xbox.

Their strategy worked brilliantly, and none of their competition has such a strong competitive advantage. Does it matter that it was expensive to acquire all those Live subscribers? No it does not. They made a huge bet on the future, and they had obscene amounts of cash available to do so.

While Sony has spent the last few years trying not to go bankrupt, Microsoft is sitting on nearly $70 billion in cash. While Sony can't make a profit, Microsoft is generating $6+ billion per quarter. Microsoft can afford to make long term bets; Sony cannot easily replicate that approach.

If the PS4 isn't successful, Sony is done in the console business. Given Microsoft's failure in tablets and smart phones, you can bet they'll spend whatever it takes to keep the XBox relevant in the living room.

The latest Nintendo console is going to be a flop (on par with the GameCube), leaving only the PS4 as real competition in traditional console gaming. Microsoft will widen its Live advantage over Sony & Nintendo accordingly, becoming one of the few subscriber kings (along with Apple, Amazon, Netflix).
Author here.

The demo actually works in all modern browsers that support WebGL. The reason why I only allowed Chrome to visit was that it was the only browser that could run it smoothly.(At least on my machine at the time I developed this demo).

I have just removed the detection. Sorry for the inconvenience and hope you enjoy it.
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At http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-... they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation in general. A smaller portion are in the binding between the DOM implementation and the JavaScript language, and fewer still are in the JavaScript engine itself.
I'd generally agree. But my impression is that Opera had small enough market share that people overwhelmingly ignored it anyways.
Thanks! ^_^

That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)
Well it depends on your perspective. I like how the article makes a statement not for today's world but for the future. I have always been of the mind that cities are for people, not for cars.
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> ...any of the current big names in the market could take my tech and bring it to market...

They could. They probably won't. They've got their own projects in the pipeline, they probably won't be as fast as you think (the first Android phone came a full year after the first iPhone), if they're behemoths then they're probably pretty risk-adverse anyway, and typically actually revolutionary ideas are sneered at by the establishment. (A very specific one that comes to mind: Paul Baran's packet-switching network idea was mocked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran#Selling_the_idea ) Stop worrying so much about imaginary competitors!

Or as Jessica Livingston wrote in the introduction to Founders at Work: "People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

"Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle. It's curious to think that the technology we take for granted now, like web-based email, was once dismissed as unpromising. As Howard Aiken said, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.""
It is important to understand that when they said "javascript" they almost certainly meant "DOM". All mainstream javascript engines, including Carakan (the current Opera javascript engine), are very compatible with the standard and with each other.

On the other hand, DOM APIs are rather less interoperable across browsers for both historic (lack of clear standards until recently) and technical (larger surface area, faster pace of addition, lack of proper testsuites) reasons. Therefore they are by far the more likely place to run into an interoperability issue.
"The idea that one can pop a pill and have a spiritual experience (instead of context-free noise) is ridiculous."

On the contrary. There have been a number of studies which have provided evidence that psychedelics can, in fact, lead to spiritual or mystical experiences.[1][2][3][4][5]

Now, that isn't to say that when you take psychedelics you are guaranteed to have a spiritual or mystical experience (or any other kind of experience). The effects of these substances are just too varied, not well enough understood, and not fully under our control. However, you can prepare for and structure the experience such that the likelihood of spiritual or mystical experiences increases.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Experiment

[2] - http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_journal2.sh...

[3] - https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/psilocybin/psilocybin_artic...

[4] - http://www.amazon.com/LSD-Spirituality-Creative-Process-Grou...

[5] - http://www.salon.com/2011/09/28/the_new_lsd_cure/
This is a really good article. Personally, I don't use Github for the same reasons - the over-whelming complexity of GIT and its terminologies. I currently use an SVN (Tortoise SVN) to keep my work in sync.
And how did you feel about the Lord of the Rings movies, about 2/3rds of anime or 12% of the BBC's output?

Stories transposed into different media are under no legal or moral obligation to produce 1:1 copies of any previous version.
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> I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine.

Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo
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I don't think that "cars allows shops to be very large" really holds. Ever lived in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore? They all have large stores and large malls and far far fewer cars per person.

What they do have is lots is support for shopping and public transport including wrapping packages so they are easier to carry (buying a printer they wrap a secure handle around the package to make it easy to carry home) and most stores offer relatively cheap and convenient delivery.
it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site

Stackoverflow feels like it's turning into wikipedia sometimes.

I thought it was an excellent question for SO's knowledge pool.
I wonder if, ironically, rendering engine diversity is something where the slow, incoherent Android update mess is actually a good thing.

To the extent that "whatever WebKit does" gets defined as "whatever ugly, lowest-common-denominator thing that works in the stock Gingerbread browser" that might help other rendering engines stay in the race. In other words, legacy Android browsers might help by slowing down the spread of new WebKit-specific features (that they also don't support).
Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.
Yeah, lots of technologies out there.

Personally I consider learning a technology as an investment. And with my investments I prefer them to be low risk.
That's why I only choose technologies which are definitely going to last a while. Sometimes it's hard to decide if a particular technology will persist. I usually look for support and endorsement of big players in the industry and sufficient user adoption.

Right now I am contemplating using angular.js. I think it would be low risk to learn since it will probably last a while because of Google's involvement and already wide usage.

Other safe options include Twitter Bootstrap, Node.js, Android and jQuery and ?

I would like to read a blog post about what Hacker News considers to be safe options to learn. Anyone interested in writing one?
Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there will be more and more webkit-optimized content. That's sad!
Well, webkit being something open and contributed to by many players in collaboration, couldn't we think of it as part of the standard itself? There isn't some evil monopoly to be had in only having one rendering engine, as much as there isn't so in having web standard technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.
Obligatory "Previous Discussion" link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222841
"If you want to log exceptions and data from your web applications you have to install a client for your language. (Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js)"
On the other hand, if all browsers just used webkit then maybe we'd finally get "write once, run anywhere" JS, CSS, etc.
Why all this criticism to this opinion piece?

The perspective is refreshing but will probably fall on deaf ears to policy:

"Many of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the policies already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are increasingly restricted in how and what we teach."

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_of_the_year/2010/01...

Soon creationists can apply their vouchers for real science!
The OUYA is going to fail spectacularly. It won't even dent the market.

Why? Because it's going to be an inferior product with an inferior ecosystem that no average gamer is going to trust to stick around. People stick with what they know and have liked in the past, unless you give them a very substantial reason to change direction (positive or negative).

Some people want OUYA to succeed, but that's not reason enough for it to.
Also Spectacular Spiderman, Phineas and Ferb, Avatar: Airbender/Korra.
Big fan of this app - definitely something I'll make use of.

One idea though: something that as a singer I would find useful is the ability to select a single base note and practice against that but without the base note being played each time - if that makes sense.

This would be handy because a big challenge for singers (or players of instruments without clear note separation) is placing the notes you hear relative to the key you're in.

I realise it's a lightweight app and making it too feature-rich wouldn't necessarily be a good thing, but I know a lot of people would find it helpful.
I hack on salt-cloud, and found it to be a useful tool. And getting better every day... http://github.com/saltstack/salt-cloud

If you build a few map files using salt-cloud, you have a quick vagrant-ish setup that you can start/stop/destroy with ease. Super easy to have a whole test cluster boot up for quick test/dev work. Fyi, salt is really awesome for people looking for alternatives to chef/puppet: http://saltstack.org
Genuine question: now they dumped their own rendering and javascript engines, what are the compelling reasons for using Opera?
As someone who's been a longtime Opera user before switching to Chrome (buggy release around 10.x, weakening site compatibility) I'm so glad to read this. This decision shows the quality of engineers who work at Opera - not afraid to throw a huge chunk of code away if it doesn't serve the company anymore the way it was intended. Thinking about it I can't make up a single example of a large software house doing such a thing.

Looking forward to get my neat features again, such as fast forward, hotkey bindings, Opera turbo..
An interesting dissection. I need to implement something like this that's a bit simpler than most of the very heavy JS libraries.
Yes, I'm sure. The same core rendering engine, known as WebCore, is shared between both WebKit1 and WebKit2 on OS X. WebKit1 is used by most applications that use a WebView to display web content, while WebKit2 is used by Safari. The different API layers set up different delegate callbacks for WebCore so that they can tweak the behavior to fit their architecture (single process vs separate web and UI processes).
Hmm, any bets on how long before the folks at Mozilla make the move as well? It seems inevitable at this point.
I tend to believe my own opinions rather than press releases :)

I'm sort of including dom<>js relations as part of the js problem tho.
I always liked them prioritizing to give you a complete out of the box features. Firefox's plugin hell made me crawl up the wall every time I saw the dreaded 'you must now restart Firefox' dialog. I assume it's better now but a few years ago Opera was so much ahead of FF in usability it wasn't even funny.
An on / off switch has two states and the current state should be clear and obvious. That's a UI pattern that applies to both real world switches and on-screen switches.

Making an on-screen switch look like a light switch, or a metal toggle switch from an old piece of equipment - that's skeuomorphism.
I loved simple vanila JavaScript in this article.
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Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years.

This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!
What will be the first release with Webkit as the rendering engine?