Google has announced it will no longer be using the WebKit rendering engine to power Google Chrome. Rather, the company will soon launch Blink, a new rendering engine based on WebKit that will be open source:
However, Chromium 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. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
Google feels the complexity of WebKit is slowing down its innovation, thus the idea for Blink was born. The company notes it will be able to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat,” which over the long term means a more stable and healthier web browser with less bugs.
How will it affect you and I? For starters it could mean faster web browsers and further innovation in that arena. Currently, most modern smartphone web browsers are based on WebKit, but with the announcement of Blink, that could all change.
Update: This is an interesting read: A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ
