Rendering engines are an important part of a web browser. They can be one of the primary reasons why a browser is snappy or dead slow. I find Chrome to be fast and responsive and one of the reasons for it is, it’s based on Webkit – an open source rendering engine.
Today, Google announced that it is ‘forking‘ Webkit and building its own rendering engine for Google Chrome.
Why is Google doing this?
One of the main reasons why Google is releasing a new rendering engine is, Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) handles multi-process architecture differently from other Webkit-based browsers (like Safari).
Another reason seems to be about decreasing the code base as much as possible. As Google puts it – “we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines”.
With Blink, Google has complete control over the rendering engine they use and that fortunately leads to less bugs and more stability.
Is Google being evil?
That’s the classic question, for a company that claims not to be evil. Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with Google releasing a new rendering engine.
Some people think that Blink is Google’s way of moving away from Apple’s involvement in its browser (Apple is one of the biggest contributors to Webkit) and that’s one way to look at it.
Opera to follow Google
Opera has recently announced its switch to Chromium Webkit from Presto. Now that Google plans for Blink as their rendering engine, Opera too agrees with it.
I’m more interested about how Blink will effect Chrome on Android, which is really slow and half-baked right now.
Link: Chromium Blog