As one of the few who paid for a web browser (paid $29 for Opera 7 in 2003), it looked to me like Opera really had no choice.
There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine.
Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they still became irrelevant but they would have also stayed irrelevant with their Presto engine.
I agree with their assessment because around 2009, I started encountering more and more web pages that broke Opera. The Opera forums had more and more complaints from users reporting broken web pages. The Presto engine was becoming a liability.
It was a vicious feedback loop because web authors wouldn't bother to test their sites with Opera ... which led to more user frustrations. I had to switch to Chrome to get a usable web surfing experience back. I originally paid for Opera because it had the fastest rendering engine which was very helpful for slow dialup connections. As Presto started falling further behind, that speed advantage was negated.
Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.
The author's predictions for Firefox's Gecko engine meeting the same irrelevant fate as Presto didn't happen because unlike Opera, Mozilla from 2004-2014 got massive funding from Google. Mozilla could afford to keep programmers enhancing the Gecko engine. Opera couldn't do the same with Presto.
There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine.
Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they still became irrelevant but they would have also stayed irrelevant with their Presto engine.
I agree with their assessment because around 2009, I started encountering more and more web pages that broke Opera. The Opera forums had more and more complaints from users reporting broken web pages. The Presto engine was becoming a liability.
It was a vicious feedback loop because web authors wouldn't bother to test their sites with Opera ... which led to more user frustrations. I had to switch to Chrome to get a usable web surfing experience back. I originally paid for Opera because it had the fastest rendering engine which was very helpful for slow dialup connections. As Presto started falling further behind, that speed advantage was negated.
Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.
The author's predictions for Firefox's Gecko engine meeting the same irrelevant fate as Presto didn't happen because unlike Opera, Mozilla from 2004-2014 got massive funding from Google. Mozilla could afford to keep programmers enhancing the Gecko engine. Opera couldn't do the same with Presto.