Opera hits 300M users, will transition to WebKit this year
Opera, the web browser available for Mac, iOS, PC and Andriod, has reached 300 million monthly users, the company has announced in a press release.
Opera Software ASA also notes that the Opera web browser will be transitioning to the WebKit engine in future versions, taking advantage of the performance and standards WebKit has to offer.
CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie, 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. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout."
Wium Lie continued, "The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry."
He also briefly addressed Opera Ice -- an unreleased, gesture-based Opera browser -- as a research and development project, and that more will information will be provided in the future.
Transitioning to WebKit will bring noticeable performance and speed enhancements to the Opera browser, which has been sidelined by the likes of Safari and Chrome, which both utilize WebKit, and Mozilla Firefox, which utilizes Gecko.
