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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

For anyone hoping for a Presto revival it's Chrome under the hood:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_2)
    AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
    Chrome/53.0.2785.21 Safari/537.36 MMS/1.0.2459.0

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Opera moved to webkit in 2012 (2013?) and then to Blink soon after googles announcement.

does this mean they are using webkit, chrome and mozilla under the hood for rendering pages? All 3?

What is the benefit? If a page is designed for Chrome then Opera could render it as intended and not how Webkit might render it, which could be wrong?

No. Their rendering engine is pure Blink. All browsers' user agent's contain mentions of more or less every browser that ever existed for historical compatibility reasons.

Safari uses Webkit (a fork of KHTML), Opera and Chrome use Blink (a fork of Webkit), Firefox uses Gecko.

Except on iOS where all browsers are forced to use a crippled version of Webkit.

No, it means that they're using Blink.

User agents are confusing things now. Everyone says they're Mozilla, and have done since pretty much the dawn of the web (Netscape, IE, everyone). WebKit claims to be Gecko. Etc.

Why? Because many websites used to look at your user agent and serve you a different version of the page to try and give you the best experience. So new browsers, or improved browsers, started pretending to be other browsers so that they could get these versions of the pages and not the one for their release from three years ago.

Eventually you ended up with a mess because everyone claims to be everyone else.

Which is why friends don't let friends sniff for user agents.

They moved to Blink the day of the announcement. They knew it was coming before it was announced.

The User Agent is no reliable way to determine or asses that, it can be set to anything. It's mainly there for compatibility reasons and to ensure you don't get caught in the remaining few User-Agent white/blacklisting policies that some institutions employ.

This makes a little more sense for what I saw with the downloads history when I installed it.

But I was also very confused because it was listing a lot of local files that weren't accessed by my chrome install, and seemed to have links to things like Skype messages, etc.

Overall it's a cute design remake of the web, but I'm not sure it's really much more than just reinventing the wheel for display. I did like the idea of the player section, but I felt it didn't really do what I would expect from something that gets its own section. It's basically just a collection of all the tabs that are playing media, which is nice I guess (it's the next evolution I suppose of the speaker icon on tabs), but I'd love it if the browser could break convention and just load the media content and keep that live in the section and leave the rest of the page alone. In my mind, this would be great for sites with live-update content that you don't want to be constantly spamming stuff and instead just pull the media you want.

It is most likely Blink under the hood[1], but the user agent doesn't give you any information on that subject.

This is Edge's user agent:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12

It's almost the same except the MMS/number being replaced by Edge/number, and Edge is using a totally different engine than Chrome.

[1] business-wise I don't see any good reason to revive a engine dead for 4 years (Presto) or even worst, develop a brand new one.

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