![]() ![]() By that time, WebKit was just as fast and standards-compliant as Presto, and the somewhat smaller footprint of Presto was not important enough to most users. But the rendering engine is not being developed further after Opera switched to WebKit. Presto still runs in many mobile phones and TV sets. So it is possible, and even fun to build your own engine.ĭoes anyone still use the Presto rendering engine? The single-digit technical team in Melbourne has implemented their own rendering engine and they have no plans to replace it. I'm the chairman of the board of YesLogic, the company which makes the Prince HTML to PDF formatter. Competition is always good, and it's helpful to verify (say) CSS specifications by having several interoperable implementations. That being said, there are several benefits to having multiple rendering engines. Your own rendering engine will probably act slightly differently from WebKit, and web developers may see this as «bugs». It's hard work to write and maintain the code. This means it is now used by all major browsers except Mozilla Firefox. In 2013, Opera switched to WebKit and Microsoft announced their switch in 2018. I don't think building a rendering engine was in TrollTech's business plan but the project had fundamental impact on the Web. The KHTML grew from being Lars' spare time project to becoming the «WebKit» code base on which Apple and Google built their own browsers. One of its employees, Lars Knoll, was active in the development of KHTML and TrollTech chose to use KHTML as the browser component. Cute name, no? For Qt, the browser was a component. TrollTech's main product was a development tool called Qt. This opened up the door to a mobile revolution which has been changed our lives ever since. Opera's code was small enough to fit into Nokia's Communicator and Ericsson's P800. Oslo is in Scandinavia, and in the neighboring countries, Nokia and Ericsson started the development of mobile devices where a browser was a key component. Opera's main product then was a browser that fit on a floppy disk - it was much smaller and faster than competing browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. ![]() ![]() Together, Presto and WebKit made the internet possible on mobile devices. This engine was later renamed by Apple which called it WebKit. It also the site where the neighboring company, TrollTech, developed the groundbreaking Qt tool, with one of its employees spearheading the KHTML engine. Opera developed Presto here, which enabled Opera to put browsers into mobile phones, TVs and kitchen sinks. In the history of the Web, Geneva is the birthplace, Urbana-Champaign is the kindergarten, and Oslo is the racetrack where two ultra-fast competing rendering engines have been developed. Waldemar Thranes gate 98 was home to not just one, but two of the rendering engines that power our browsers. Why is this building in Oslo so important for the Web? Håkon Wium Lie, who served as Opera's CTO for 18 years, took the initiative to add the historical marker. This building was home to not one, but two of the rendering engines which empower web browsers. On October 16, a blue historical plaque will be added to an office building in Oslo, celebrating its key role in the history of the Web. Presto and WebKit celebrated on October 16, Opera's former CTO and one of the Web's founding fathers, Håkon Wium Lie, proposes World-Wide Browser Day in a guest blog post and unveils commemorative plaque in Oslo. Håkon Wium Lie in front of the first Opera HQ, now a historical site ![]()
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