So the news we were all dreading came to pass. Opera will drop Presto, in favour of WebKit. Four becomes Three. Only one browser engine remains where the dominant contributions come from an independent vendor who don’t have a vested interest in a large native ecosystem. What does this mean for Opera, and the Web at large?
Internet Explorer 10 introduced a new featured called Flip Ahead. This makes a best guess at detecting the next page, article, post, thread, product or so on. When the user performs a forward swipe gesture (or presses the forward button on a mouse) it loads the detected page. If this sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably heard about or used Opera’s Fast Forward feature. This is roughly the same concept (although Opera bundles in other things, such as logging in), and can be activated using a mouse gesture, or pressing the space bar when reaching the end of the page.
Both implementations use heuristics to detect the next page. For Opera they are defined in the fastforward.ini file. The location of this file can be found by enteringopera:config#UserPrefs|FastForwardConfigurationinto the Opera url field. I’m unsure of the exact heuristics employed by IE. Browsing history data is reported back to Microsoft to improve Flip Ahead, so I expect the heuristics will evolve time goes on. As the feature “phones home’ it is opt-in and thus disabled by default.