Opera, the little web browser that could, has decided to ditch the Presto rendering engine in favor of the more developer friendly and open source Webkit. This announcement comes hot on the heels of reports that put its user base around the 300 million monthly user mark.

Switching to Webkit will be greatly beneficial to the open source project, web developers, and the Chromium project. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software said, it "makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further."

The switch to Webkit will not be an instant one though as Opera plans on rolling the change out to iOS, Android and PCs over the next year. CEO Lars Boilesen said that he hopes that the change will help the browser "claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market".