The focus is on optimization for now, but new features are coming as well

May 21, 2013 09:18 GMT  ·  By

Google hasn't said much about Blink, its WebKit replacement, since it announced it a couple of months back.

That's not to say that there haven't been developments, it's just that the work so far has mostly made Google's work easier without actually adding anything new to Blink/WebKit.

But the company has said from the start that the first target was code cleanup. It expected to be able to remove some 4.5 million lines of code from the project right off the bat by dropping support for seven architectures that Chrome doesn't support but WebKit did.

It's done more than that though, as in the past couple of months Google has been able to remove some 8.8 million lines of code and this without diving hard into optimization or rewriting code.

Less code means Google's engineers can work faster and be more productive. The smaller codebase alone means developers can check out updates and test the changes they make faster.

Google's Alex Komoroske, one of the leaders of the Blink project, talked at Google I/O last week about just how much more productive the people working on the rendering engine have become since the fork.

There's more, by leaving WebKit behind, Google is much freer to experiment and is already working on some things that couldn't have been possible before.

For example, Google wants to see if it can implement a way for the browser to process only the parts of the page that users actually use, i.e. what they see on the screen.

Another experiment is project Oilpan in which Google is trying to determine whether it can move DOM nodes into a garbage collected heap which would make them much easier to work with.

It's going to be a while before any of this makes it into Chrome, but the future isn’t looking too bad.