When Google declared on Wednesday, April 3rd on its Chromium Blog that Opera, Chrome and Chrome OS would soon be using a new rendering engine known as ‘Blink’, it took many by surprise, as the current engine, WebKit, was doing fine. Google also highlighted this point by saying that making the change was “not an easy decision,” but as innovation has slowed down, the change was necessary. In its blog post Google apologetically said that they know the new rendering engine may have major implications for the web, but in the future, Blink will improve the condition of the open web system. Google believe so because it has removed the “multi-process architecture” that will not only help make the engine code more simple, but also ease the difficulty of building for Chrome OS and Chrome.
In addition to this, Google is also hopeful that with the advent of Blink ultimately internet load times will decrease. Blink is basically based on the existing engine WebKit.
Here is the full press release of Google from its Chromium Blog:
“WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium’s rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.
However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
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.
In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.
Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve setstrong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.”
Source: 9to5Google, ChromiumBlog
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