14 DAY TRIAL // Google has made a major announcement that will have a huge impact on the browser market, it's forking WebKit and creating Blink, a new web browser engine, to be used in Chrome and Chrome OS. This move is somewhat surprising and has a lot of repercussions on many levels.
The biggest and most obvious is that Google will have its own rendering engine to use in Chrome and Chrome OS. It will be able to make any change it wants and it will be able to move faster than ever.
In fact, that's the big reason why Google decided to abandon WebKit and start its own engine.
It says, in not so many words, that WebKit has become too unwieldy and the fact that it's designed to work on many platforms means any change can impact other using WebKit in unpredictable ways.
"Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects," Google's Adam Barth wrote.
"This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit," he announced.
Blink is a WebKit fork, so there won't be any major or even minor differences between the two engines in the short term.
For now, Google will be focusing on simplifying the code base, removing anything it doesn't need for Chrome and Chrome OS. Right off the bat, Google will be able to remove seven build systems, for platforms Chrome is not available on, and remove 7,000 files with 4.5 million lines of code.
This has many benefits, for both users and especially developers. Google will be able to make more changes and test them faster than ever before. Less code and fewer supported architectures means less bugs as well.
Google's Alex Russell, writing on his personal blog, explains that the big reason for switching to Blink and the biggest benefit, at least for now, is development speed.
Being able to make changes and test them fast, due to small compile times, means developers will take more risks, experiment more and generally work faster and better.