In a sudden move, Google announced yesterday that it would be abandoning the stock version of the WebKit rendering engine for its Chrome browser. Instead, Google will use a modified version of WebKit called “Blink” for its future browser releases. This decision wasn’t made lightly as the WebKit rendering engine is quite popular (Apple’s Safari uses it) and standardized for web developers. Google Software Engineer, Adam Barth, stated in a blog post:
“This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.”
The reason why Google made the decided to develop and open source Blink is because the current version of WebKit “has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects,” writes Barth. Blink aims to have as minimal of an impact on web developers as possible. For now, it seems that Blink will only contain architectural changes and cleaned up code. What this means is the browser will be less resource intensive, which is great news for mobile users.
Google will still be committed to open standards for the web and has a long documentation about Blink’s changes on its project page.
Source: Google Open Source Blog
