[at-fates-hands]

Opera was originally based on the Presto layout engine from 1995-2013. Then it switched to being a Chromium based browser in 2013 so they could utilize the Chromium plug-in ecosystem.

The ecosystem is the big issue for a lot of these products. It why Microsoft's Windows phone failed so badly - they didn't have the app store to compete with or allow users to migrate to their platform without losing a lot of apps they already used on Apple or Android.

The ecosystem is a major reason why you don't see more competition.

[flagrant]

> Then it switched to being a Chromium based browser in 2013 so they could utilize the Chromium plug-in ecosystem.

Opera switched to Chromium because they didn't consider it profitable enough to keep developing their own engine, and laid off a large portion of their browser developers. It was entirely about money and nothing to do with using Chrome extensions.