> I do wonder if they considered Mozilla's Gecko engine.
Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo
I don't think it has to do with servo, which is really just a research project.
Gecko is a lot harder to embed (so yes, legacy is and issue here), and webkit is compatible with more sites (as sites are now often "designed for webkit" and use specific webkit-only extensions)
Makes the choice very easy and logical IMO. Not really good for the web, but maybe not a bad idea for Opera. Time will tell.
Gecko has a lot of legacy, and to be fair, even Mozilla has tentative plans to transition off of gecko, to be replaced by servo: https://github.com/mozilla/servo