Opera hits 300m users; announces shift to WebKit engine

February 14th, 2013, 23:47 Posted By: wraggster

Claims it's going to snatch a 'bigger piece of the smartphone market pie'.
Opera has crossed the 300 million monthly user milestone, inclusive of all browsers across mobile phones, tablets, TVs, and PCs. It comes following last month'spartnership with Neomobile to introduce one-click operator billing to Opera Mini.
The browser firm says it will continue focusing on mobile and aims to become a leading service for Android and iOS, which will be achieved by moving to the open source WebKit engine that's currently used by its Apple and Google competitors.
Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software, said: "300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on. On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market."
Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, added: "The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need. It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further."
The 300m user base is up from reaching 200m back in July.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/...-engine/020588

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