They announced the switch before Google had publicly announced Blink, so they had to say Webkit initially, even though they knew (and probably form part of) Google's plan.

And also, who in their right fucking minds wants a file download client built into their browser?

Not just a torrent client. It also has a built in webserver (nod). Along with the email client, contact manager, IRC client...

And yeah just tried it out and it's as Pete says. In UI terms it's a straight hybrid of Chrome and FF.

And yeah, Blink is just what Google are calling their Webkit now, innit? Wikipedia says it's a joint project between Google and Opera which I suggest is a little bit generous to Opera.

Time to pacman -Rs opera :Y

Why generous? Opera were the driving force behind a lot of the current HTML improvements, so it makes sense that they'd be a useful partner in giving Webkit an overhaul.

Slight difference between being able to download files and having a torrent client built into a browser that associates itself by default with .torrent files (even if you already had a torrent client) without telling you.

I wouldn't mind so much if they said "Hey, did you know Opera can also download torrents? Would you like us to be the default torrent client on your PC?" and gave me the option to say no. But they don't.

To make matters worse, they become the default client for all user accounts and when you remove Opera it doesn't restore the associations you had previously, meaning you have to dick about in the Windows Registry to get it all removed.

It's obvious what they're doing is banking on the less technically adept installing it and then becoming stuck with Opera because they don't know how to undo the changes it makes to the system.

Maybe. But it's going to be a long time before many of those improvements are incorporated into Webcore, I would imagine.

I think it did ask that for me, but it's been so long since I installed it that I can't remember for sure.

I do hate how ... sneaky they can be though - on Opera Mobile every so often I'll find a bunch of shit added to my speed dial. :@

Which also reminds me of Adblock Plus recently - it keeps updating, flashing up a stupid tab, and re-enabling the "Google are forcing us to allow their ads" option, with no way to stop it. :@

Probably. I think the first step is ripping out Apple shit and re-architecturing it to run better?

Aye that seems to be the main focus. Having just read up on it a bit, it all seems rather sensible.

I actually switched back to chromium the other day. It's a bit annoying because generally speaking I prefer FF. I prefer its interface (once I've rearranged it to my satisfaction (I also prefer that I can do that)). And I prefer the philosophy and position of the Mozilla foundation to that of Google.

And yet... Chromium is just (or feels at least) significantly faster again. And just runs better on Linux too (where I spend 99% of my time these days).

It just feels like a more modern approach to making a broswer, really. Taking on board all the lessons learned over the past decade or two. I'm not really sure how FF can respond.

I still use both in roughly equal measure.

Chrome/ium's UI is shit, but less contrived than what Firefox does.

It's faster to startup, and a bit lighter weight - though a huge chunk of that is faked, which makes it a pain when things are actually running slowly. And having task manager spammed with processes is a pain.

Also is/was less effort to configure multiple instances - even though they're not really separate instances and interfere with each other except in the places you actually want them to.

For everything else I currently can think of, Chromium is equally or more shit compared to Firefox, and if I didn't open and close assorted browser sessions so often I'd probably ditch it. :/

The right way for Mozilla to respond ... well there's a thing Linus said about Git - any time he was unsure how to implement something, he'd look at SVN and do the opposite. Mozilla need to do that with Firefox, instead of aiming to be a poor imitation of Chrome.

Aye, your last paragraph makes a lot of sense :Y