(Yeah, Opera needs to just.. stop. So sick of all the Opera oddities, combined with their 0.5% market share.)
Proposing that there be only one seems very dangerous to me. But as an argument for Opera (and other tiny-market-share) browsers dropping their proprietary engine and switching to either Gecko or WebKit, I'm all for it.
I'm intensely relaxed about Opera support. I suspect that the 0.5% people using Opera know what they're doing, and can deal with the odd incompatibility by firing up something else. Opera compatibility is a nice-to-have, but that's it.
IE6/7/8 are still a very much bigger problem, because there are still people that for whatever reason (e.g. corporate IT policy, total lack of knowledge) can't upgrade and can't use anything else.
Not all features that are standardized are implemented properly on all browsers. This is what uses developer time.
It's not terribly different from the situation that exists in the C++ compiler world. Different compiler vendors implement different featuresets. It took many years after the release of the 1997 standard for any compiler to implement it 100%. Is there a compiler out there that implements the current standard completely?
1. Trident (IE10+) 2. Gecko (Firefox) 3. WebKit (Safari, Chrome)
(Yeah, Opera needs to just.. stop. So sick of all the Opera oddities, combined with their 0.5% market share.)
Proposing that there be only one seems very dangerous to me. But as an argument for Opera (and other tiny-market-share) browsers dropping their proprietary engine and switching to either Gecko or WebKit, I'm all for it.