Hasta La Gadget!

Opera has just reported that it lost about 91 of its employees, which amounts to almost 10% of its workforce. Half of the employees were developers for the software company, and the reason for the cut was due to Opera’s decision to switch over to the open-source WebKit browser. The switch left the company with 840 employees last quarter, down from the 931 that it had previously had.

Opera has stated that the restructuring of the company due to the switch actually cost around $7.8 million. Due to Opera switching from it’s old proprietary, rendering engine, Presto, to WebKit, many of the jobs at the company became obsolete. Opera stated that the workers left voluntarily after they had received their severance packages. Opera was kind enough to help many of the workers find new jobs within the industry.

Opera also stated that because of the switch to WebKit, it didn’t need to dedicate a majority of its resources to improving Presto. All it needed to do was contribute to the open-source WebKit community. With that, some of Opera’s key engineers were transferred to more product-specific roles within the company.

Opera believes that with the company switching to WebKit, and with its recent acquisition of Skyfire, the company is about to start its new, exciting chapter. It had recently announced that over 300 million users are using its product on a daily basis, and it’s ready to do something big to one-up itself. It will show off a glimpse of what it’s been working on at the Mobile World Congress next week.

[via The Next Web]

Opera cuts down its workforce by 10% is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Browser developer Opera has passed the 300m monthly users mark, celebrating the milestone by transitioning to WebKit for its Android and iOS apps, with the first open-source contributions already apparently made. The shift to WebKit, away from Opera’s home-grown browser engine, will begin this year, though the roadmap is described as “gradual”; it’ll get its first public preview, meanwhile, at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.

For Opera, the change in underlying platform is because “it makes more sense” to work in collaboration with existing open source projects, CTO Håkon Wium Lie said today. “Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”

The first stage of the process has already, in fact, been teased. Opera ICE, shown last month, is a minimalist app that pares back browsing to the bare minimum, with advantages in speed and simpler navigation. Described as an R&D project by Opera, ICE will be further detailed “in the future” the company says, though its immediate attention is on more market-ready products, such as the Android app.

As well as WebKit for the mobile portfolio, Opera will adopt Chromium – the open-source engine which powers Google’s Chrome browser – for its desktop software. There’s no word on when, exactly, the first fruits of the software switch-over will be released publicly.

Opera hits 300m users: Celebrates with WebKit/Chromium adoption is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Mozilla hasn’t been the most eager supporter of commercialized media formats; it flipped the H.264 switch in Firefox’s HTML5 support last year only when it was clear WebM wasn’t taking off. Still, those who regularly test the company’s latest work will be glad to hear that support for AAC, MP3 and H.264-based MP4 is now enabled by default in Firefox nightly builds. Provided you’re using Windows 7 or newer, it’s no longer necessary to change settings to play relatively common HTML5 audio and video formats. Web users wanting the extra support in a finished version of the browser will need to wait for a completed Firefox 22, which is expected to launch in late June; risk takers just need to check out the source links.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: Thundering Herd, Mozilla

The dream for WebRTC is to offer truly software-independent video and voice chat, but it hasn’t worked out that way given limited support. Google and Mozilla have just showed us that it’s at last possible to reach across the aisle, provided both sides are running the newest browsers. Should one user run Chrome 25 beta and the other run a nightly build of Firefox, a flag switch will let the two sides hold a video conversation solely through a web app. This doesn’t mean we’re about to toss out Google Talk or Skype, mind you: even when finished versions of the browsers appear, we’ll need both a completed WebRTC standard and the web developer support to see broader usage. Nonetheless, it’s clear that cross-browser chat is at least on the horizon.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Chromium Blog, Mozilla

You’ve likely already heard of the Java security scandal, which was something Oracle looked to fix quickly with an update to the software. Even though Oracle says it has patched the issue, some entities disagree. The latest to add its name to the list of dissenters seems to be Apple, as it has decided to block the Java 7 browser plug-in, even after the update was delivered by Oracle.

According to MacGeneration and this thread on the Apple Support Communities site, Apple has blocked this latest version of Java using its Xprotect software. Apple uses Xprotect to keep malware out, and this is the same software it used to block Java earlier in the month. Just as it did before, Apple has made Xprotect block a version of Java that doesn’t yet exist, meaning all earlier versions (including the current one) are blocked as well.

Apple isn’t the only one taking issue with Oracle’s claim that the security concerns have been addressed. The Department of Homeland Security is still recommending that consumers refrain from using Java after the update, saying that all of the security flaws have not yet been fixed. The flaw could potentially allow unsigned applets to run without permission, which in turn means that some of the more undesirable people of the world could potentially take control of your computer.

So, with the Department of Homeland Security still warning against using Java, it may not be such a bad thing that Apple has restricted access to the browser plug-in. This will naturally prove to be headache for a lot of different Mac users considering that Java is everywhere these days, but until Oracle provides another update, there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done. Stay tuned, because we’ll probably be hearing more about this soon.

[via MacRumors]

Apple says no to Java 7, blocks browser plug-in is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.