Opera abandons Presto engine for Chromium/Blink AI-researched
Dependency: Opera Presto rendering engine
Opera 15 abandoned the Presto rendering engine for Chromium/Blink, eliminating one of four independent browser engines and advancing the monoculture that reduces the diversity of how web art can be rendered and experienced.
Fixes & Mitigations
- No fix available: Presto is gone. The unique rendering behaviors it produced cannot be experienced in any current browser.
Opera 15 (July 2, 2013) abandoned the Presto rendering engine — which Opera had developed independently since 1995 — and adopted Blink (Chromium). This reduced independent browser rendering engines from four (Trident, Gecko, WebKit, Presto) to three.
What changed
Presto had unique CSS handling and rendering behaviors that differed from both WebKit and Gecko. Net artworks that exploited browser-specific rendering differences — works that looked intentionally different in each browser — lost one axis of variation. More broadly, the web lost rendering diversity. When Microsoft Edge later abandoned EdgeHTML for Chromium in January 2020, independent engines dropped to just two (Gecko and WebKit), with Blink/Chromium dominating.
Notes
Browser engine diversity was, for net artists working in the late 1990s and 2000s, a creative resource — the same HTML and CSS produced different visual results in different browsers, and artists could compose with that unpredictability. The steady collapse toward Chromium monoculture has eliminated this dimension of web art practice.