The company says the job losses were voluntary redundancies rather than (involuntary) lay-offs, with support and severance packages offered to all those leaving.

Opera's CEO Lars Boilesen notes that as a result of the WebKit transition, the company now has twice the resources working on the desktop as it previously did. Freed from having to expend effort on its engine, the company can focus on the interface and other software features.

Lighten up.

Mozilla is not anti-webkit, and neither is its senior ranks.

Biting the hand that feeds IT.

A top bod at Firefox-maker Mozilla has ruled out replacing its web browser's brains with WebKit - and lamented Opera’s surrender to the web engine favoured by Apple and Google.

Mozilla's chief technology officer Brendan Eich said he was “sad” the world had lost “one of the few remaining web platforms”, and invited downcast Opera developers to join the effort behind Mozilla's Gecko browser engine.

JavaScript inventor Eich, who recently assumed development of Firefox OS for mobile, ruled out replacing Mozilla's Gecko with WebKit. Aside from the complexity, cost and delay in making such an architectural switch, Eich claimed the web is a safer and healthier place with diversity at its heart.

He said: “Monoculture remains a problem that we must fight. The web needs multiple implementations of its evolving standards to keep them interoperable.”

In short, Opera and those pushing Mozilla towards WebKit are wrong, according to Eich, who envisioned the need for “a new cleanish-slate open-source web engine project” to motivate programmers into contributing and also to “avoid depending on an engine that an incredibly well-funded and lock-in-prone competitor dominates, namely WebKit".

Only Redmond left drinking out of own browser plumbing

Opera Software is throwing in with Apple, Google and open-sourcers by dumping its browser’s proprietary HTML rendering engine for WebKit and Chromium.

Opera is killing Presto in favour of the open-source WebKit 'ware used in Apple’s Safari and iOS plus Google’s Chrome, among other browsers and runtimes. New versions of Opera will also use Chromium, the open-source browser tech that forms the basis of Google’s Chrome.

Opera promised a “gradual transition” to WebKit in up-coming versions of its browser on smart phones and computers.

This being open source there’s a trade-off, and in return for using WebKit and Chromium, Opera’s joining the communities working on the code to fix bugs and new features.

Opera chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie said in a statement:

"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.”

One consequence of Opera’s decision to join the Apple and Google in-crowd is that it’ll raise questions over Microsoft and IE. Microsoft is now the only browser maker still pouring money and time into a closed rendering engine that – in effect - simply helps the company keeps pace with everybody else.

Microsoft’s surely aware of the interest in WebKit and the competition this poses to IE, with the IE team posting this in 2012 as IE10 shipped.

But with shrinking market share for IE, it seems Microsoft will need to revisit the wisdom of adhering to the “not invented here” syndrome in the wake of Opera.