Earlier this year Opera has announced they will abandon their render engine and move to Webkit. As a long time Opera fans, I am very ambivalent about this.

The day has come as last. As I download and setup Opera on a new computer, I find that the old Opera is no more. The new Opera is essentially a custom shell of Chrome. The biggest surprise is perhaps I'm still using Opera at all. This is probably not out of loyalty, but rather more of a habit.

The good thing is I can reliably use many web applications without running into compatibility problem. The bane of old Opera is from time to time, web applications will run into problem and not working fully. You learn to become observant and switch to another major browser when necessary in order to proceed. Now web applications work in Opera with greater certainty.

The flip side is it has lost a number of features. One of them is the ability to applied user defined style sheet. I hate to read web page with grayish low contrast font. With old Opera I can switch to high contrast style sheet at my pleasure. Now I have to put up with bad web design. This is a feature I miss. I hope in time Opera will add back these good features into webkit based browser.

2013.12.26 comments