Google's Chrome web browser was built on WebKit, an open source rendering engine developed by Apple that also underpins many other browsers, including Safari and Opera. But on Wednesday, Google told the world it will no longer use WebKit. Instead, it's starting its own variation -- or fork -- of WebKit. This new open source project is known as Blink.
The aim is to speed the development of Chrome -- and, according to Google, speed to development of WebKit too -- but an extra rendering engine can only make it harder for web developers to build sites that work well across the popular browsers.
There are already two other major rendering engines -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer engine and Mozilla Firefox's Gecko. Opera switched from its own rendering engine to WebKit in February.
Google's decision is in tune with its overall efforts to improve the infrastructure of the internet. When it comes to browser software and other web technologies that directly effect the how quickly and effectively your machine grabs and displays webpages, the company likes to use open source technologies. That way, it can feed their adoption outside the company -- and ultimately improve the delivery of its many online services (including all important advertisements). But if it believes the rest of the web is moving too slowly, it has no problem starting up its own project.
According to a Google blog post, the trouble with WebKit is that is used 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. "Supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both [projects]," the post says. "This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation."
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, leaving WebKit to go its own way.
With the blog post, Google played down the effect this would have on web developers. The company says it will focus initially on internal architectural issues that will have little effect on web developers. "Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem," the announcement reads.
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.
