Firefox 19 is competing with Adobe now by integrating a PDF viewer into Firefox. It’s a bit slower than the Adobe plugin, I think, but it looks promising.
In addition, Version 19 comes with several fixes; among other things, Firefox is supposed to be starting faster (again).
Fir Firefox users, downloading version 19 is, of course, a no-brainer.
As I have only just read, Norwegian browser maker Opera has chosen to abandon their web rendering engine ‘Presto’ in favor of Webkit. Webkit is the rendering engine used by Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Amazon’s Silk browser (for the Kindle Fire).
Opera Software developers will participate actively in the development of Webkit. I think that’s a real shame: the heart of a browser is the rendering engine - by getting rid of Presto, Opera will lose its own distinct personality. The WWW is in danger of becoming monoculture; Web standards become “Webkit standards”. The openness of the Web is in danger.
So what about Mozilla then? Mozilla has its own rendering engine called ‘Gecko’ (which came tzo life in the good old Netscape days) — and let’s hope it stays that way: the Mozilla’s mission is to help create an open World Wide Web, abdandoing Gecko in favor of Webkit would go against that belief. And, last but not least, most Firefox addons run on Gecko.
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