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Opera has announced its plans to ditch its Presto rendering engine in favor of Webkit in order to allow it to focus its engineering resources to developing new features and user-friendly solutions.
Webkit, according to Wikipedia, is the most popular web browser rendering engine; prominent users include Google Chrome as well as Apple’s Safari browsers.
Other major rendering engines are Internet Explorer’s Trident and Firefox’s Gecko engine.
Credits: Wikipedia
Newsflash: Google is not the only one with its sights set on TVs; Opera has unveiled its latest product – “Opera TV Store” at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.
Opera TV Store is a web app store for televisions that runs on Opera’s platform/browser. Apps already available include Facebook and Vimeo.
Seems like Opera has been pretty aggressive in growing their market recently. Soon after announcing the launch of their new cross-platform mobile app store – Opera Mobile Store, Opera has announced that it has entered into a joint venture with China’s Telling Telecom (天音通信) to develop and market a customized mobile browser for the Chinese market. While Opera brings with it the mobile browser technology and knowhow, Telling Telecom (天音通信) brings local content and its distribution network – ~18% market share of Chinese mobile-phone distribution industry – to the table.
Opera, in partnership with Appia, has announced the launch of its mobile app store – Opera Mobile Store, which can be accessed via a featured Speed dial link in Opera Mini or Opera Mobile browsers. Alternatively, you can also access it via mobilestore.opera.com from any mobile web browser. The Opera Mobile Store is a cross-platform app store that is powered by Appia’s storefront commerce technologies, offering apps for Java, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android operating systems. In its pre-launch state, the Opera Mobile Store attracted more than 15 million users in February from 200 countries, achieving more than 700,000 downloads per day.
Opera Mobile Store
Opera Mobile Store
Opera has also launched the Opera Publisher Portal to provide developers with tools and resources to get their applications onto the Opera Mobile Store and in front of Opera users.
Opera Publisher Portal
Opera has announced that they have released a beta version of Opera Mobile 10.1 for Android. Opera Mobile is a HTML5-capable browser for mobile devices and this is the first time it is made available for Android; previously only Opera Mini, a lighter-weight version, was available for Android platforms.
Opera has announced that Opera 11 will have extensions capability – i.e. you can enhance your Opera browser by installing third-party plugins, similar to what you can already do with Firefox and Chrome.
Opera 11 will be built on top on Opera 10.70 builds, implying that Opera 10.70 final will not be released.
Related news:
Opera Releases Support for HTML5 WebSockets
Opera has released a public build (development snapshot) with support for HTML5 WebSockets, which will be built into Opera 10.70.
With this announcement, Opera has joined the ranks of Firefox, Chrome and Safari in WebSockets support. Now, IE is the only major browser left that has yet to support HTML5 WebSockets.
HTML5 Web Sockets allow a web application to create bidirectional TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connections from the browser to a server. These Web sockets, being bidirectional, imply that the server can now push data to the browser.
Prior to Web Sockets, web apps such as web Instant Messaging (Meebo, EBuddy, etc) often made use of Ajax techniques, specifically XMLHttpRequest objects or invisible
(Please refer to my short writeup on HTML5 for more details.)
Opera had announced the release of Opera 10.6. Among support for typical HTML5 enhancements such as Geolocation, Web Workers and Offline Applications, Opera 10.6 has also built in the ability to play WebM videos, the first stable browser version to do so.
According to Youtube HTML5 beta page, the other browsers supporting WebM are Google Chrome 6 Dev Channel and Firefox Nightly Builds
Credits: WebM project
