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Google has announced that its Chrome browser is dropping the popular WebKit browser engine in favor of Blink, a new fork of the code that the Chocolate Factory says will make Chrome faster, more powerful, and more secure.
The internet ad giant announced the move on Wednesday via the official blog of the Chromium project, the open source effort upon which Chrome is based.
"This was not an easy decision," Google's Adam Barth wrote. "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."
Past versions of Chrome have rendered web content using WebKit, the same open source rendering engine that powers Apple's Safari and various other desktop and mobile browsers.
But Chrome never used WebKit in quite the same way that Safari did. For example, Chrome ignored WebKit's JavaScriptCore component in favor of Google's homegrown JavaScript engine, V8. It also handled multiple browser processes in a significantly different way than Safari did.
The need to maintain a WebKit code base that worked with Chrome's approach as well as those of other browsers has made both the WebKit and the Chromium projects increasingly complex to manage, Barth said, which in turn has slowed down the pace of development.
By breaking with the mainline WebKit project and developing Blink as a separate effort, Google aims to improve Chrome more rapidly while allowing Safari and other WebKit-based browsers to do the same.
Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/04/google_forks_webkit_as_blink
The internet ad giant announced the move on Wednesday via the official blog of the Chromium project, the open source effort upon which Chrome is based.
"This was not an easy decision," Google's Adam Barth wrote. "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."
Past versions of Chrome have rendered web content using WebKit, the same open source rendering engine that powers Apple's Safari and various other desktop and mobile browsers.
But Chrome never used WebKit in quite the same way that Safari did. For example, Chrome ignored WebKit's JavaScriptCore component in favor of Google's homegrown JavaScript engine, V8. It also handled multiple browser processes in a significantly different way than Safari did.
The need to maintain a WebKit code base that worked with Chrome's approach as well as those of other browsers has made both the WebKit and the Chromium projects increasingly complex to manage, Barth said, which in turn has slowed down the pace of development.
By breaking with the mainline WebKit project and developing Blink as a separate effort, Google aims to improve Chrome more rapidly while allowing Safari and other WebKit-based browsers to do the same.
Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/04/google_forks_webkit_as_blink
