Opera Lost 90 Employees in the Transition to WebKit

Hardly surprising, but Opera's move to WebKit and Chromium didn't come without casualties, outside of the browsers. Opera lost some 90 people, half of which were developers, over the past few months many of them in January.

Opera didn't fire most of them, but instead offered hefty severance packages for those who chose to leave voluntarily.

The Core Technology division has been terminated outright, that much makes sense since they wouldn't have anything to work on.

Some on the team left, others were moved to other development areas, the mobile and desktop browser teams in particular.

That said, the 90 people that left made up just 10 percent of the workforce and some positions were bound to disappear with the transition.

Meanwhile, several developers are trying to salvage presto and are asking Opera to release it as open source.