Google has just announced that it is forking the open source WebKit browser engine started by Apple to create its own Blink rendering engine for its Chromium project, which feeds into the Chrome browser.
Apple built Webkit out of Khtml
for its Safari browser, and the company released it as open source
software in 2005. Google went on to adopt it for Chrome. Opera recently announced that it would switch to WebKit, but it has now confirmed plans to go with Blink instead.
The move to Blink is a significant one, as it dilutes WebKit’s (and
indirectly, Apple’s) influence on the browser market. WebKit had reached
as high as 40% overall market share as of late 2012.
Google explains that the reason for the decision is that Chromium has
a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit browsers.
“Supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to
increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects,” Google
engineer Adam Barth wrote in a blog post, adding that it has had an
adverse affect on the “pace of innovation”.
Barth also noted that the decision wasn’t easy, but Google felt that
the existence of multiple rendering engines would “improve the health of
the entire open web ecosystem”.
Google says that not much will change at first, though the company
does expect to quickly remove 7 build systems and 7,000 files from the
codebase. Blink has policies in place instructing developers on when to
add new features and it will also get rid of vendor prefixes.
The news comes as Mozilla and Samsung have also outed collaborative work on their own “next-generation” browser rendering engine, called Servo.
Developer reactions to the decision appear to be mixed. Francisco Tolmasky, a veteran of Apple’s Mobile Safari team, says he’s “very excited” about the new fork. He went to argue on Hacker News that Google practically controlled WebKit at this point anyway, based on the commits.
“This is what happens with software. Goals change, old code and
design no longer makes sense, you refactor or rewrite,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Pocket’s Steve Streza
was a bit more cautious. He was hesitant to say whether it’s a good
thing, noting that it will be beneficial for Chrome users in the short
term, but he’s “not optimistic” in the longer term.
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