Google’s decided that WebKit isn’t cutting it for Chrome anymore, the company has decided to fork the open source engine, and instead, begin to integrate its very own Blink rendering engine.
The reasons for the move?
Directly from Google’s Chromium blog:
The main reason is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. So, over the years, supporting multiple architectures has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium communities, slowing down the collective pace of innovation.
If you’ve deduced that Google’s feeling the restraints around WebKit and that they think they can do better on their own, you’d be right.
Before you run off all worried about browser compatibilities and multiple style sheets, Google obviously realizes that people are concerned about fragmenting the web.
In the developer FAQ for the Blink engine, the Chrome developer relations team puts the worries to rest rather quickly: “We see testing as the critical piece of web browser interoperability. Chrome currently shares and runs tests that were authored by Opera, Mozilla, and W3C Working Groups and we’ll be doing a better job of this going forward. Developers need to be able to rely on Chrome’s implementation of standards, and that’s something we take very seriously”
There you have it. Blink’s coming to Chrome, and it’s certainly going to be sooner than most thought. Oh, and the Blink project will be “open source” too, which is great. Right?
