Opera switching to WebKit+V8

Opera has decided to switch to using WebKit and V8 for for all new products. First they'll start with a product for smartphones (since as they say, many mobile-facing sites are only/best tested on WebKit anyway), and then Opera Desktop and other products will follow.

By my count, that leaves us with three major rendering engines (WebKit, Gecko, and Trident), and three major JavaScript engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, and JScript). Well, you could perhaps argue that there are two JScripts (the really broken one in IE8 and earlier, and the much better and completely rewritten one in IE9 and later), but let's not quibble.

A reminder how Microsoft used to drive web innovation

As IE6 finally rides into the sunset,* Nicholas C. Zakas offers us a reminder of how, in a series of browser releases culminating in IE6, Microsoft introduced many of the key web innovations we use today such as innerHTML, access to all elements (not just forms and such), Ajax, modern events, and several others. This isn't in any way to discount what Netscape and others have done, but it's worth remembering that the browser everyone loves to hate was easily the best browser available when it came out. (Opera made a run at it soon thereafter, but never quite managed to take the lead, mostly because it didn't support legacy non-standard sites well. And then of course, along came Firefox, and then Chrome.) Good read, thanks Nicholas!

(* Unless — huge caveat — you're creating sites for China [21.3% market share], or arguably for Japan [4.7%] or India [3%].)