Google is working on its own browserrenderengine under the name Blink. Initially, the engine is still based on the code of open source software WebKit, but he will gradually in its own time. Opera adopts Blink, which is now the basis for Google’s Chromium project.
The reason for WebKit to fork is according to Google, that innovation is hindered by the increased complexity of both WebKit as Chromium. Chromium is the opensourceproject that is at the basis of the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. However, there are already a number of fundamental differences between Chromium and other WebKit-based browsers: as used in the Chromium project a different multiprocess architecture.
For web developers there will be the next time little change, promises Google. The first step will be according to the company to clean up the code. Google is expected to directly seven buildsystems and more than seven thousand files, good for a total of 4.5 million lines of code, to be able to delete it. In the long run, a healthy codebase for a more stable browser with less bugs, the Chrome developer.
Nevertheless, the fork in the long term, however, the influence on web development. WebKit is the basis of not only Chrome, but also Apple’s Safari and Opera, and these companies contributed jointly to the development. The split of Blink will be the opensourcecommunity of WebKit developers for a choice set. Also, Google will own functionality to Blink, add, and, can the company now has its own choices to make what support of new web standards. According to Google having multiple renderengines, however, for more innovation, and also would, in the words of the company contribute to ‘the health of the entire open web ecosystem”.
Opera, Google will follow and also from Blink are going to make use, both at the desktop and the mobile versions of the Opera browser. “When we announced Presto behind us, we made known with Chromium to continue, and the fork and the change of name is of little influence on the Opera browsers,” says Opera spokesman at The Next Web.
The name Blink is referring to the much criticized and non-standard blink element of html that text could blink. The development of WebKit itself was in 2001, set in motion by Apple as a fork of khtml and KDE’s JavaScript engine. The W3C warned a year ago for the dominance of WebKit, which is a browsermarktaandeel of about 40 percent. Firefox uses the Gecko engine and Internet Explorer uses Trident.
Update, 12.50: According to Google Chrome developer Alex Russell will Blink, especially the development of the Google browser speed up, and this was hampered by the joint development of WebKit. Also, he suggests that developers with Blink less have to be afraid that changes have unintended consequences. A representative of Chrome security, Justin Schuh, said that Blink offers the possibility of ‘a lot of security issues that have piled up to tackle’. He points, among others on the development of Site Isolation.