Hasta La Gadget!

While the non-final build of Opera’s new browser for PC and Mac was simply called “Next,” today it’s chosen the more formal title of Opera 15 for its official release. There aren’t any features of note that we hadn’t seen in the desktop preview of the WebKit-based software (or should we call it Blink-based?), but to jog your memory, it sports a fresh design, a Discover feature for catching up on the latest news and a tweaked Speed Dial menu for quick access to your favorite corners of the internet. Also, the web-clipping Stash feature, predictive address-cum-search bar, new download manager and “Off-Road mode” for extra compression on lousy connections are all included in the final version. We ran a quick SunSpider benchmark on the Mac build of Opera 15, in which it scored 167ms, compared with 171ms in Chrome. If you’re not already allied to one of the many competing browsers and feel like giving Opera 15 a try, head to the source below for the download links.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Internet, Software

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Via: SlashGear

Source: Opera (1) (download), (2)

Google let us all know that it would strip out unneeded WebKit code to make its Blink web engine scream, but it never said exactly what kind of pace we could expect. The answer, it turns out, is “breakneck.” The company’s Alex Komoroske told Google I/O attendees that the Open Web Platform team has already yanked 8.8 million lines of programming from Blink in about a month, with 4.5 million of them scrubbed almost immediately. Removing so much cruft has reportedly improved not just the upcoming engine, but the engineers — they’re far more productive, Komoroske says. The team has already had time to explore new rendering techniques and garner code contribution requests from the likes of Adobe, Intel and even Microsoft. Although we don’t yet know if all the trimming will be noticeable to end users by the time Blink reaches polished Chrome and Chrome OS releases, it’s safe to say that some developers won’t recognize what they see.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: TechCrunch

Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. The true ramifications aren’t entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won’t be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won’t actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won’t prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork — the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works.

Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it’s expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it’s already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit’s baggage.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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You could call WebKit the glue that binds the modern web: the rendering engine powers Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and many mobile browsers past and present. Things are about to unstick a little. Google believes that Chromium’s multi-process approach has added too much complexity for both the browser and WebKit itself, so it’s creating a separate, simpler fork named Blink. Although the new engine will be much the same as WebKit at the start, it’s expected to differ over time as Google strips out unnecessary code and tweaks the underlying platform. We’d also expect it to spread, as the company has confirmed to us that both Chrome and Chrome OS will be using Blink in the future. We’re safely distant from the Bad Old Days of wildly incompatible web engines, but the shift may prove a mixed blessing — it could lead to more advancements on the web, but it also gives developers that much more code to support.

Update: The Next Web has confirmed that Opera, which recently ditched its Presto engine for Webkit, will indeed be using Blink as it’s already hitching its proverbial wagon to Chromium.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Chromium Blog

Opera browser made a seismic shift when it dropped its long-in-the-tooth Presto engine in favor of WebKit, and now you can see the changes for yourself. It’s up for grabs in beta on Google Play, packing the same rendering engine as its Chrome and Safari counterparts along with a handful of extra features. Those include an updated speed dial page for easier launching of favorite sites, off-road mode to conserve data, a discover tab and HTML5 support. We haven’t seen it yet on iOS and there’s no date for a final release, so keep in mind you’ll be test-piloting the still-beta app — check the source to grab it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: Android Police

Source: Google Play