What are you referring to? Opera and IE certainly used different rendering engines: Trident for IE, Presto for Opera (before it moved to Blink).

Back in the Netscape 4 days, the architectures of those engines were broadly the same (in the sense that Linux and FreeBSD have broadly the same architecture). Of course the codebases were different.

How do you know this? Trident and Presto were both closed source, did you do some contract work with both Microsoft and Opera at the time?

Presto wasn't released until 2003.

In the late '90s, the time frame this thread is about, it was well known that the layout engines at the time were not dynamic: they could not in general reflow only parts of the page. Everything else I mentioned in the post that triggered this subthread is obvious simply based on browser engine and OS history.

Architecture != functionality.

I don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. Do you dispute this?

> (Netscape 4/Opera/IE) didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to.

The internal structure of a program = architecture.

The features of a program = functionality.

So we're getting our wires crossed due to word choice.

In any case, I'll admit this has dragged on long enough. Truce?

Wasnt aware of that. Interesting.

It was just faster, better looking, and skinnable. Plus malware stayed hitting IE so there was that too.

I don't think the statement you replied to is correct.

Yep. No point in fixing it though.