The Google Chrome web browser is built on WebKit, an open source rendering engine developed by Apple which is also the backend for many other browsers including Safari and Opera. However on Wednesday Google announced that they will no longer be using WebKit and would instead start working on their own variation of WebKit.This new open source project will be called Blink.
Google reasons that their aim is to speed up the development of Chrome, and thus speed up the development of WebKit in the process. Unfortunately the introduction of a new rendering engine can only make it harder for web developers to build websites that work across all the popular browsers.
Currently there are two other major browser engines - Microsoft's Internet Explorer engine and Mozilla's Gecko which is used on Firefox. Opera which was using its propitiatory Presto engine made its switch to WebKit in February.
The WebKit project is run by Apple, but it’s actually a fork of KHTML, a rendering engine featured in the Linux browser Konqueror. In 2001, after Apple ported the project to its Mac OS X operating system, it became the foundation for Safari.
According to Google the trouble with WebKit is that it uses different “multi-process architecture” than its Chrome browser, which basically means it didn't handle concurrent tasks in the same way. When Chrome was first released in 2008 WebKit didn't have a multi-process architecture, so Google had to build its own. WebKit2, released in 2010, adds multi-process features, but is quite different from what Google had already built. Apple and Google don’t see eye to eye on the project, and it became too difficult and too time-consuming for the company juggle the two architectures.
By splitting off from the main WebKit project, Google will be able to focus on developing the features it needs within the architecture it requires, allowing WebKit to go its own way.
The concern we are left with is about the effect this would have on web developers, though Google claims that it will focus on internal architectural issues that will have little effect on web developers.
What do you think of Google's plans on forking away from WebKit development? Share your thoughts with us below.
source - Google