What Google's Move to Blink Means for Web Developers
Some web developers felt a disturbance in the force when Google recently announced that the Chrome browser will be moving on within the coming months from WebKit to Blink, its new open source rendering engine that’s based on WebKit.
Suggesting that WebKit is “slowing innovation,” Google’s Chromium blog says that while it was a “lightweight yet powerful” rendering engine for the early days, today’s Chrome:
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.
What does this mean for web developers? According to Google, developers will see little change in the short term. Initially, the focus will be on improving the internal architecture and simplifying the codebase.
And, long term? Google gives this optimistic, yet vague response: “Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.”
The Chrome Developer Relations team’s Paul Irish and Paul Lewis authored a Blink Developer FAQ, which included:
Is this new browser engine going to fragment the Web platform's compatibility more?...We see testing as the critical piece of Web browser interoperability. Chrome currently shares and runs tests that were authored by Opera, Mozilla, and W3C Working Groups and we'll be doing a better job of this going forward. Developers need to be able to rely on Chrome’s implementation of standards, and that’s something we take very seriously. See the Testing section for our plans.
InfoWorld noted that Google’s news “came in near lockstep with Mozilla's declaration that it had teamed up with Samsung to create a new browser engine called Servo, built on Rust. Opera, meanwhile, announced it too would shift to Blink (rather than WebKit).”
Engadget downloaded Blink’s experimental browser and reported:
We loaded up several sites in the stable and Canary versions of Chrome and couldn't spot a single difference. There were no strange glitches or visual bugs. Not a single pixel was shifted out of place in the layout -- at least on pages. Favicons and text in the tabs themselves was shifted down slightly, bleeding into the address bar. Subjectively, pages behaved exactly the same as well and were every bit as responsive using Blink as they were under traditional WebKit. That's not a bad thing, either.
So, is Blink going to be a disturbance in the web? Google’s position is that “having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.”
What do you think?
