Don't Blink

Don't (Photo credit: >Rooners)

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful engine that emerged out of in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful made it the obvious choice for Chromium‘s rendering engine back when Google started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, has thrived and kept pace with the web platform's growing capabilities since then.

However, 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, are introducing Blink, a new rendering engine based on WebKit.

This was not an easy decision. Google know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, Google 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, Google 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, Google will collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, Google have set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

To learn more about Blink visit Google's project page.

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