Recently Opera Software announced that they will be switching over to using the WebKit engine. WebKit is an open source web browser engine used by both Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. It includes an HTML and CSS renderer, as well as a JavaScript engine.
This is, all in all, a good thing. A browser’s one and only purpose is to retrieve and present information from the web. Why should different browsers be doing this differently? As a web developer, why should one have to worry about which browser a user is viewing their page with? Assuming the screen dimensions are the same and it’s running on a similar device, the page should render the same regardless of what browser you use. If a driver turns the steering wheel of their car clockwise, they expect the car to turn right. Likewise, if a developer wants a div to be partially transparent, they would do opacity:0.4 in CSS. But unfortunately that doesn’t apply to every browser – you also have to do filter:alpha(opacity=40) to support older versions of Internet Explorer.
It’s just silly. In an ideal world, the only difference between browsers would be the interface.
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