April 4, 2013: In a recent announcement by Google through its blog post on Chromium blog, they have decided to use Blink in the Chromium open source browser project and decided to discontinue Webkit rendering engine which they have been using since last twelve years. Blink is a new open source rendering engine which is based on Webkit. This announcement of Google has surprised many since Apple’s Safari browser uses Webkit and Opera which user to work with Presto rendering engine has also announced the use of the same open source rendering engine.
Google with this move feels that this introduction of Blink will increase innovation and will have significant implications for the total web ecosystem. Google’s Chromium open source browser project earlier used to use multiple architectures which was making things complex for Webkit and Chromium projects. This resulted in slowing down the pace of innovation. This change in use of Blink is not going to result in much change in the work of the developers but as the engine matures they will have to test the work separate for browsers which are powered by Blink.
Google though expects to spur up innovation in browser and rendering engine space it will have to face some challenges as well like the Google Chrome browser for iOS will have to be based on WebKit since iOS browsers supports only that. It needs to be seen how far Google’s gamble of moving to Blink like other browsers is going to improve the health of entire open web ecosystem in the coming years.
