Yesterday while downloading opera mobile for my Nokia 808, I decided to give a look at Opera for PC. Though, I have used opera for PC before but those past browser by the Norwich firm were slow and incompatible with many website in contrast to their mobile counterpart which are best alternate browser on any mobile platform. Proceeding with download, the downloaded version was 15 unlike their mobile versions 12 or 13. Surprise didn't ended here, the new Opera 15 browser installed in seconds and was fast, reliable and provided excellent compatibility to whatsoever website i opened on it. While still wondering(after making Opera 15 my default browser) about level of improvement provided by team opera, curious, I start digging through Internet looking for finding reason behind sudden version change and behavior. I found out that opera has changed their engine layout engine from their proprietary "presto" to open-source webkit based chromium engine. As most of you would aware - chromium is the heart of Google Chrome browser. Going deeper into my research i found out that Opera along with Google Chrome will be again switching their layout engine from chromium to blink. Blink will be a fork of the WebCore elements of WebKit. The development of different layout engine by Google has put evolution of Webkit to Webkit2 in dark light. This has already started war between founding member of WebKit, Google and Apple, over multi-process support and the point of integration between rendering engines and browsers.
With browser engine Presto already dead, and Trident almost on verge of it, leaves us with two layout engine gecko and webkit. Anyways if you're bored of chrome or firefox but want same level of browsing experience on a new browser, Opera 15 is a nice experience. The original Opera browser based on presto is still available in 12.XX version, if you want to test a new engine also Opera 15 is coming on your Android too.
