I am sure that there are reasons that they cannot easily do this, but I really wish that they'd open source their Presto browser engine now that they've moved to Chromium anyway. I always liked the way that classic Opera made web pages look. Maybe it's just rose tinted glasses but it felt like Opera had a nice smoothness to it, almost like a PDF or something.

If they FOSS'd their old engine, conceivably someone could modernize it and we'd at least have one more competitor in the browser space, though typing this out I'm realizing that maybe that's why they haven't opened it up in the first place.

▲

TheAmazingRace 2 days ago | parent [-]

I wholeheartedly agree. Presto was very lightweight and, to my knowledge, exceptionally standards compliant as well.

I think the last version of the Presto engine did have a source code leak, but naturally it's not a great idea to work on it unless you want to catch a lawsuit.

▲

tombert 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, if the Opera corporation gave a blessing to use the leaked code then that would be great; I'm not going to look at it until I know for sure I'm not going to be sued.

It's too bad, I hate that we basically only have two browsing engines that people take seriously: Blink/Chromium and Safari for iOS. Firefox is there but it lags pretty far behind those two. Having a little more competition in this space could be good.

▲

tosti 2 days ago | parent [-]

There's LadyBird, https://ladybird.org/

	▲	tombert 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm aware, but that's not usable yet in any real sense. I'm glad we're getting another engine and it would be cool if it becomes competitive with the other. I'm just saying that Presto was already competitive with the others before they changed to Chromium, and I wish that they had open sourced it if they weren't going to use it anyway.