Opera Saddles up With Google, Apple by Moving to WebKit

From DailyTech: That's the take home message from Opera Software ASA's (OSE:OPERA) somewhat surprising announcement that it is going to transition to the WebKit platform, taking its 300 million plus users with it.

Opera boasts tens of millions of desktop users, but is a niche player in the desktop browser market compared to the likes of Google Inc. (GOOG), Apple, Inc. (AAPL), The Mozilla Foundation, and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). However, Opera has relatively strong market shares in both the third party mobile browser (smartphones/tablets) and [gaming] console markets.

Opera long used a rendering engine (also known as a "layout engine") named Presto. Opera's work with Presto was important to the internet, as the Norwegian company often pushed web standards that other plays like Microsoft or Mozilla were slower to adopt.

Mozilla uses an open source rendering engine named Gecko, and Microsoft uses a proprietary engine named Trident. But between Safari (Apple) and Chrome (Google), WebKit is estimated by market research firm StatCounter to be the world's most used layout engine with more than a 40 percent market share.

WebKit is published under a mixture of GNU LGPLv2.1 and BSD v2.0 licenses and thus is consider relatively "open source".

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