Ultimately presto should be O/S'ed to allow those who want to to dev it and make it their own. Opera could always MIT or such license it to reclaim those features should it want to option a return to the presto OS engine.

Why not do this, unless they are genuinely scared of creating a competitor to their own blink...

FYI and worth noting up til opera 12 user share and market share was increasing significantly. Now, well the majority and it is the majority of opera users visiting sites are still doing so in 12 not blink. So that's the lions share of the users on the system not moving to the new browser...

Windows 8 anyone?

So when we don't move over because if we want to use chromium we'll use it why would we use blink or for that matter dragon or any of the other subversions of the main core browser what happens to your revenue stream then when your user base plummets... Still at least when opera becomes a used to be a browser maker all the newer blink based users will in fact have something to transfer too, unlike us sadly...

It's a disgusting way to treat a long term user base and shows how one day blink users you too will be treated when the next CEO or dev team decide to just banjax this engine for the next flavour of the month 'beta'.

What I find odd about this is people telling me opera is free. No it's not. For a start some of us have been here since opera was a paid for browser. And we Paid for it. Sure in later years to try and increase market share it became an adware supported browser and later a free to download browser. But this isn't an entitlement born out of some ephemeral I should have it because it's what I want.

Us oldskool users who bought the product supported, contributed and in many real ways paid for the development of the software and it's updates to now say to users like me who've been here for a long, long, long time and paid and paid for the browsers development tough and screw you we're not actually going to a) provide the product we've paid for b) we're actually going to reverse years of development to go with a smaller and in many real ways worse feature set is frankly appalling.

It's what happens when corporates ruin a good idea for the sake of profit.