Presto being exchanged for open source projects

Opera is replacing the Presto rendering engine used in its web browser with WebKit. The migration to a different rendering engine comes at the same time the browser is celebrating 300 million monthly users in total over all formats, including smartphones, smart televisions, tablets, and personal computers.

The WebKit switch will be beneficial to the open source project, as well as that of Chromium. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software said 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."

The motives of changing to WebKit extends past helping open source efforts. CEO Lars Boilesen hopes that the change will help the browser "claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market," on top of the 300 million-user milestone recently achieved.

Opera will be making a gradual change to WebKit for its browsers on iOS and Android mobile devices and computers over the next year.

by MacNN Staff