Opera Lays Off 10% Of Its Employees While Switching To WebKit

Opera Software announced that it will make a transition to the WebKit engine during 2013 for most of its upcoming versions of browsers, as it hit the 300 million monthly users milestone. Today, the company has laid off approximately 90 of its employees, downsizing its workforce by almost 10%, according to a Norwegian publication Digi.no (via TNW).

It must however be noted that the 90 or so employees that left Opera weren’t all actively developing. In fact, some of them had simply become obsolete because of company’s switch from its old rendering engine to the open-source WebKit project. Opera CEO Lars Boilesen told TNW that majority of people who had stopped working for the company in the second half of 2012, voluntarily decided to leave due to the switch to WebKit “after being offered severance packages”.

Not all of those who left served in technical roles either, as some of the people that are no longer with the Opera Software actually worked in marketing and sales and a number of other departments. Boilesen noted that the company has actively helped many of them find new jobs within Norway’s IT industry.

In fact, of the 90 people who left Opera, only about half were developers.

Boilesen also said Opera has never employed as many engineers in its smartphone, tablet and desktop browser product divisions throughout its now 18-year history, asserting that they’re now in super shape.

The CEO also said that his company will keep hiring and become bigger than ever this year.