As one of the few who paid for a web browser (paid $29 for Opera 7 in 2003), it looked to me like Opera really had no choice.
There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine.
Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they still became irrelevant but they would have also stayed irrelevant with their Presto engine.
I agree with their assessment because around 2009, I started encountering more and more web pages that broke Opera. The Opera forums had more and more complaints from users reporting broken web pages. The Presto engine was becoming a liability.
It was a vicious feedback loop because web authors wouldn't bother to test their sites with Opera ... which led to more user frustrations. I had to switch to Chrome to get a usable web surfing experience back. I originally paid for Opera because it had the fastest rendering engine which was very helpful for slow dialup connections. As Presto started falling further behind, that speed advantage was negated.
Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.
The author's predictions for Firefox's Gecko engine meeting the same irrelevant fate as Presto didn't happen because unlike Opera, Mozilla from 2004-2014 got massive funding from Google. Mozilla could afford to keep programmers enhancing the Gecko engine. Opera couldn't do the same with Presto.
(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making).
There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the option that Mozilla took, which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. Would that have worked? It's hard to say. I would guess not, but I'm not sure the alternative really did either. Maybe Opera was already too far down the web-compat death spiral to engineer a way out. I don't know of a long-term bet like Rust that could have come good at the right time.
Certainly the top-level culture of the organisations was different; Opera's leadership were very concerned with maintaining/maximising the value of their shares, whereas Mozilla is more clearly driven by ideological goals around the success of the open web. Opera also had a (historically well justified) belief that they could do more with fewer engineers than other compaines. That seemed to work up to a point, but once the difference in resources became too great it was hard to change the approach.
Certainly one lesson is that it's hard, maybe impossible, to be a niche browser with a unique rendering engine. That is arguably a failing of the web, but nevertheless it's a strong indication that arguments that e.g. Mozilla should aim Firefox at small ideologically-driven markets are dangerous. One interpretation of the Opera history is that they were too focussed for too long on the subset of users who wanted a browser with lots of features and configuration possibilities. A product that suits those people might be actively offputting to other users, so inhibiting marketshare growth when faced with competition targetting simplicity and sane defaults.
I read a post once from another (claimed?) ex-employee who said that around 2009 or so, Opera wasn't doing so great and they laid off a dev or two and then after they recovered half a year later, they never re-hired to fill the gap. The poster accounted the technical falling behind to that layoff. Do you share this impression?
As for me, I still use Opera 12 almost on a daily basis and the main issue I have is not broken websites but inaccessible websites because of HTTPS and Opera not supporting enough recent ciphers. The second most frustrating thing is that the JS engine shows its age performance-wise; pages that make heavy use of it for all kinds of dynamic shenanigans get rather sluggish. So my uneducated guess from these observations is that it should have been possible to keep up if they'd wanted to. It's probably that management simply thought using an engine that someone else maintains for them makes it possible to cut down on devs even more. But that part might just be my make-believe world...
It seems to me to be overly simplisitc to take a specific event and say "that's the decisive moment where it all went wrong".
Technically Presto had some unique features; for example the inturruptable script engine allowed the browser to feel performant and responsive without having to heavily invest in parallelism via multiple threads or processes. But it also had some architectural differences to other browsers, and never had the market clout to ensure that the Opera-unique features were reflected in platform features and so had to be implemented by the competition, or even to ensure that features that were hard/impossible to implement in Presto did not become required for web-compatibility. For example Presto was unable to implement beforeUnload without a significant rewite of the core document loading pipeline, but that omission from Presto wasn't enough to prevent sites depending on it when it worked in Gecko/WebKit/Trident. Similarly a lot of effort would have ben required to port Presto to multiple processess (similar to the multi-year "e10s" effort for Gecko).
Presto was also highly optimised for memory consumption and so was ideal for running in resource constraimed environments like early smartphones and games consoles. But I think the launch of the iPhone and Mobile Safari changed consumer expectations for the web experience on mobile and Opera didn't manage to respond in an effective way. I have no idea what the optimal response would have been, but if Presto could have achieved double-digit marketshare on high-end mobiles (as opposed to low-end devices running Mini), we might have avoided many of the compat issues that currently affect the mobile web.
Organisationally I think there were other issues; I already spoke about the focus on the particular use case of making a highly integrated, highly configurable, desktop browser product, which doesn't look much like the more successful mass-market browsers today. I think later there were other problems, but I was far away from the executive decision making, so maybe I'm not best placed to comment on what the actual company goal was.
The fact that Opera couldn't keep up with the standards is also a product of the fact that WHATWG is mostly run by the big orgs. They standardize features at the same rate that the big orgs say that they are developing them.
Idiotic behavior like keeping bugzilla secret (sadly again adopted in Vivaldi due to same people in charge) didnt help either. They didnt even try all that hard before giving up. Opera had an option of open sourcing Presto.
How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.
Wow, really? I've gone from regarding Firefox as a complete also-ran that I would never use unless necessary, to making it my default browser. Quantum is significantly faster than Chrome on my machine - it does eat more battery, but I feel it's worth it for something this fast & smooth. It feels like I got a new computer. (I'm using a 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, still on El Capitan.)
In my experience, it's spectacular. I've switched back from Chromium to Firefox. It feels snappier than Chrome, and the newer dev tools means I don't miss Firebug.
I noticed this a few times when having a massive number of open tabs around (500+). In these cases one process of firefox consumed 100 % CPU and another 40-60 %; restarting Firefox removed the excessive CPU consumption and the spinners as well.
It's not a popular opinion here, but FF57 is bad enough that I have given up on it for the first time in maybe 7 or 8 years. I am now using either Waterfox or Qutebrowser for everything.
>Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.
Unite is a typical example of something that worked fine and disappear all the same. I haven't find any browser that surpass Opera 12 to this day. All the new "exciting stuff" are no use to me. I don't want to adapt to my browser, I want a browser that adapt to me.
There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine.
Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they still became irrelevant but they would have also stayed irrelevant with their Presto engine.
I agree with their assessment because around 2009, I started encountering more and more web pages that broke Opera. The Opera forums had more and more complaints from users reporting broken web pages. The Presto engine was becoming a liability.
It was a vicious feedback loop because web authors wouldn't bother to test their sites with Opera ... which led to more user frustrations. I had to switch to Chrome to get a usable web surfing experience back. I originally paid for Opera because it had the fastest rendering engine which was very helpful for slow dialup connections. As Presto started falling further behind, that speed advantage was negated.
Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.
The author's predictions for Firefox's Gecko engine meeting the same irrelevant fate as Presto didn't happen because unlike Opera, Mozilla from 2004-2014 got massive funding from Google. Mozilla could afford to keep programmers enhancing the Gecko engine. Opera couldn't do the same with Presto.