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Interview With Bruce Lawson of Opera
There’s a perception that being in developer relations for a browser maker is all glamor and glitz involving lots of jet setting and rockstar-like experiences. So far I haven’t personally found that to be the case but in looking at the life of Opera evangelist Bruce Lawson, I think he may be fitting that description.
Helping fight the good fight for standards, Bruce is constantly on the move either updating his awesome book Introducing HTML5 (which is regarded as one of the best HTML5 books out) or attending developer conferences to read the pulse of the community.
With Opera’s recent shift to the Blink rendering engine, I managed to snag some of Bruce’s time to ask him how the shift will change the Opera browser.
Q Let’s start with the usual. Could you give us a quick intro about yourself?
I co-authored the first book on HTML5, "Introducing HTML5" (New Riders). I’m one of the founders of HTML5Doctor.com, and was a member of W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group. I evangelise open web standards for Opera, the oldest browser manufacturer whose mobile, desktop, TV and embedded browsers are used by 300 million people across the world.
Q In spite of traditionally having excellent standards and feature support, the Opera browser has struggled with desktop marketshare and ensuring developers properly test for it on their sites. Why should developers consider the Opera browser and what do you think will be the impetus for them to do so?
Developers should find that Opera behaves as Chrome does.
Well, it would be nice if it went without saying that web developers should develop for the web and not individual browsers, and these days all browsers have great standards support. However, one of the problems that we had is that developers didn't test on Opera properly – because many devs are in the USA, and our desktop browser has a high market share in countries outside the US. So we've recently changed the rendering engine inside Opera Desktop and Opera Mobile to the Blink rendering engine that Google Chrome uses (we're the first to ship Blink-based browsers). Developers should find that Opera behaves as Chrome does. Because of greater compatibility with mass-market sites, and a more visually appealing UI, and some unique features, we're aiming to grow the user base more in the USA and Western Europe.