Google Plans To Ditch WebKit, Announces Blink
No more vendor prefixes.
Now here is something that you won’t see very often. Yesterday, Google has announced its plans to “ditch” WebKit and develop their own rendering engine called . Now, before developers get a heart attack, it should be noted that Blink (when it comes to standards) is pretty much a rebranded version of WebKit, at least for now.
So why do it at all? As explained by Adam Barth, the software engineer at Google, it’s all about reducing the complexity and simplifying your overall code base. In fact, it’s estimated that right off the bat they will be able to remove over 7,000 files with a total of 4.5 million lines in code, which says a lot.
Where all these complexities come from? According to Adam, “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.”
TechCrunch also notes that Google is the main contributor to WebKit with 95 reviewers, followed by Apple’s 59, then BlackBerry, Nokia and few other companies. It will be interesting to see how will this affect WebKit in the long term.
What excites us the most is the fact that Google will use Blink to power Chrome OS, which could bring a lot of exciting things in the future, especially in the web app department.
That’s all we know, there is no release date or anything but we expect to hear more details at the upcoming Google I/O conference in May 15-17, 2013.
[Thanks, Blake]
About (Author Profile)
Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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Excellent
Another vendor prefix for CSS developers!
-blink-whatthefuck!
Nope. They wont use prefix.
They follow Mozilla and will hide all experimental features behind about:settings/configs flags.
So no more experimental html/css in production web sites.
As long as it works suits me fine!
Mozilla has done a great work with -moz-border-radius WOW! (obviously irony)
prefixes that are there, stay there till standard is ready.
The version 182 is out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ht5RZpzPqw
I heard alpha build was pretty bad, here is a review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvyl82t9IuY
weeping angels, do not blink
Google actually fork WebCore witch is responsible for rendering of HTML and CSS, and it was only part of Webkit Google used for Chrome.
Other components as JavaScriptCore, and Webkit (set of API that allowed webbrowsers to use Webkit) where not used and hence Google/Webkit devs needed to account for what each other used.