Names of Opera 6- and Netcape 4- rendering engines?

[JAB Creations]

What are the names of the rendering engines for Netscape 4 and prior and Opera 6 and prior?

John

[DrDoc]

Netscape has always been Mozilla.

Opera 4-6 : Elektra

[Hester]

Was Presto Opera 7? I know Merlin is Opera 9.

[Robin_reala]

Yep, Presto is Opera 7-8, and Dreamweaver MX on Mac.

[drhowarddrfine]

Mozilla is Gecko. Although Netscape on AOL, I've heard, has a switch that allows you to go back and forth with IEs engine.

[JAB Creations]

What is the original Opera rendering engine called? The engine before Elektra that is?

Also where could I confirm the name of the earlier Netscape rendering engine?

John

[DrDoc]

Mozilla is Gecko

Mozilla (the browser) is Gecko ... Mozilla (the engine) is, well, Mozilla :)
Just to make sure we keep them straight.

The Netscape people had their Mozilla engine (which sucked) and started working on a standards compliant (and GOOD) engine, which they called Raptor. That was later changed to NGLayout as the working name, before it was finally released as Gecko.

[edited by: DrDoc at 5:01 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2006]

[DrDoc]

Also where could I confirm the name of the earlier Netscape rendering engine?

A search for "rendering engine netscape 4" should probably return a bunch of results for you. Or, if nothing else, I'm sure you have played with UserAgent stuff ... You know how it always says "Mozilla" for both Netscape and IE? Mozilla is the name of Netscape's initial engine. IE just copied that in their own agent to seem "nifty".

[JAB Creations]

Come on Doc, give me some credit. I know the difference between Gecko and Mozilla! Geckos are small creatures that run all over the place here in Florida and Mozilla is ahh, a Japanese monster that terrorizes cities and travels in a wheelchair. To see an illustration do a search for "Mozilla accessibility". :)

Still does anyone know the name of the old Opera rendering engine for Opera 3 and older?

John

[DrDoc]

LOL

I was not worried about you, JAB ...
I just wanted to be clear enough for future readers of the thread. :)

[DrDoc]

Hmm ... From what I have found so far, it almost seems like Elektra was the only rendering engine in Opera until replaced by Presto.

[JAB Creations]

I'll post that question at the Opera forums then. They may be 1% of the market share but they are enthusiastic and usually well acknowledged about such things from my perception.

John

[JAB Creations]

Rijk (one of Opera's coders) explains on his page (which I won't link but you could find if you search for quoted text)...

The Opera browser, written by Jon and Geir, started live as MultiTorg Opera, a company project of the Norwegian telco Telenor. The browser that was released in 1996 as shareware after Jon and Geir made Opera a separate company was called Opera 2.0. This version was further developed, with 3.0 and 3.5 as significant milestones (3.0 adding Javascript support and 3.5 adding CSS1 support).

The next version of Opera that was being developed in 1999 and 2000, was codenamed 'Elektra'. Nowadays people like to talk about 'rendering engines', but at that time Elektra was simply a codename for what was to become Opera 4.0: the entire browser. Elektra was designed in a manner that would make it easier to create versions for multiple platforms, not just Windows. The Elektra codebase would get better and better over the years, as the developers worked on improving it. Mac and Linux versions saw the light, but these versions were most of the time months or even years behind the Windows version. Opera 6.0 added the much needed Unicode support to this line, to make Opera a truly international contender. 6.0 was also the end of the line, and the Opera 6 codebase was also ported to the Symbian platform.

But at the time Opera 6 was being worked on, a few developers where already working on the next generation browser. And this one would truly have a separately developed browser core (rendering engine, scripting engine, networking stuff). The rendering engine, the part that was completely rewritten, was codenamed Presto.

So anyone know who coined the term "rendering engine" and when that happened?

John