Opera made a lot of people angry earlier this year when they said they were going to stop working on their own web rendering engine and instead switch to WebKit. Personally, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I always thought it was an incredible waste of resources to have brilliant minds working on two separate projects, making each incrementally better, instead of combining efforts to really move the ball forward for the engine that powers almost everything.

Shortly after Opera made that announcement, Google announced they were going to fork WebKit and work on their own engine called Blink. Don’t be worried though, Opera said they’re basically going to follow Google, which brings me to today’s news.

Opera for Android is now out of beta, and it’s based on WebKit, but a later version will be based on Blink. What’s important here is that it has Opera’s user interface, which some people like. I installed the new app to give it a go, and I immediately had issues. Several sites I visited rendered zoomed in for no apparent reason. And scrolling just wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be. I even made it crash when loading a web page with an embedded video.

So for now, I’ll stick to Chrome.