Chrome moves away from WebKit with Blink Fork

[peteyt]

Couldn't see this on here so thought I'd post it. Chrome is creating a fork from WebKit called Blink which will be used from Chrome 28 onwards.

From what I can gather, the reason for this is due to the fact WebKit has a lot of features that Chrome doesn't use and so Blink will allow for a streamline and then eventually be able to focus on chrome only features, apparently better support for multi core browsing being a top.

To begin with however, there won't be much change. Some people think that creating a new rendering engine will cause more bad than good, meaning extra work for web developers (to begin with at least this won't be a problem).

I am excited to see what will happen in the future with this, but what do the web developers on here think?


http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/3/4180260/google-forks-webkit-with-new-blink-rendering-engine-for-chrome

[Chippiewill]

This could be the knife in WebKit's back, Apple do not appear committed to maintaining WebKit to the extent that Google was and intend to strip out most of what Google contributed. Certainly it seems most minor projects which are using WebKit will be moving to Blink.

If anything it's bad for ensuring Apple implement standards, previously Google would just dump new standards into WebKit that are optional so it was trivial for Apple to implement them, but now they may not be so keen on all the extra leg work.

The good news is that it should speed up Chrome a bunch since the interface between DOM and V8 will be much simpler. Also since Google have more control over Blink, any standards implemented will not likely be optional so projects using Blink will be fairly up to date with standards. However the main pressing issue with Chrome at the moment is it's RAM usage which it really ought to get a hold of and hopefully the streamlining with assist with this.

[peteyt]

However the main pressing issue with Chrome at the moment is it's RAM usage which it really ought to get a hold of and hopefully the streamlining with assist with this.

Yeah that is one of the biggest complaints I see so wonder if Blink will improve this, fingers crossed.