Opera has now confirmed that the company would be moving along with Google’s new WebKit fork, the Google Blink rendering engine. So starting next version, Opera would carry the new Blink engine, instead of the Presto content rendering engine.
Google’s move to fork WebKit to create their own Blink rendering engine was a huge thing for the WebKit using browsers across the world. While its’ obvious that Chrome would start adopting this new engine starting version 23, its Opera which joins this bandwagon, dumping Presto for Blink.
Talking to TNW about this move, an Opera spokesperson says:
“When we announced the move away from Presto, we announced that we are going with the Chromium package, and the forking and name change have little practical influence on the Opera browsers. So yes, your understanding is correct,”
And this change is due for both the desktop and mobile apps of Opera. This move has mainly come in, to free some of its resources in developing its own rendering solution and adopt a well built solution like Blink.
Opera’s decision to adopt Blink should be making Google excited. Opera might not be the top browser in the desktop space, but its definitely a winner in the mobile space, with all its cloud syncing capabilities in place. And the company also said that this move would benefit more than 300 million users across the world.
Now that two major WebKit browsers are adopting Blink, it would be interesting to see what other browser makers would make this move. Especially, if Safari makes a move towards Blink, it would be a sure win for Google.