Opera has just reached its 300 million user mark today and in celebration of reaching that milestone, they’re also transitioning to the WebKit engine for both their Android and iOS apps. They will also be adopting Chromium for all of its upcoming browsers for smartphones and computers alike. By adopting both WebKit and Chromium, they hope to grab a “bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market”.

Opera believes that working with the open source communities is the smartest move right now instead of just developing their own rendering engine further. With WebKit and Chromium already well established, Opera feels that those two will help it go a long way in bringing its product to the next level. Opera has already submitted their first set of patches that will improve their “multi-column layout”.

Opera will be showing off a preview of their new browser at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The browser, codenamed “ICE”, is a result of Opera’s experimentation with WebKit so far. Opera was able to take advantage of WebKit’s resources to bring new features and user-friendly solutions to their browser that they hope will generate a lot of buzz. They feel that their new web browser for Android is nearly ready for prime time and good enough to show off.

With 300 million already being an amazing milestone, Opera feels like WebKit and Chromium would be its best bet in bringing the browser to an even further milestone. It will get rid of the old “back” and “forward” buttons and implement new gesture features to navigate through webpages. With Opera demoing their new browser at MWC in a couple of weeks, Android Community will show you a hands-on demonstration of what the new browser is capable of. Stay tuned.

[via SlashGear]