Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome. Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink.
As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and “a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future. Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project. WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001.
Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then. However, 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.
This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit. Opera confirms it will follow Google and ditch WebKit for Blink, as part of its commitment to Chromium. Google on Wednesday made a huge announcement to fork WebKit and build a new rendering engine called Blink.
Opera, which only recently decided to replace its own Presto rendering engine for WebKit, has confirmed with TNW that it will be following suit. “When we announced the move away from Presto, we announced that we are going with the Chromium package, and the forking and name change have little practical influence on the Opera browsers. So yes, your understanding is correct,” an Opera spokesperson told TNW.