I know you’ve been asked this plenty of times already, but: no new vendor prefixes, right? Right?
Nope, none! They’re great in theory but turns out they fail in practice, so we’re joining Mozilla and the W3C CSS WG and moving away them. There’s a few parts to this.
Firstly, we won’t be migrating the existing -webkit- prefixed properties to a -chrome- or -blink- prefix, that’d just make extra work for everyone. Secondly, we inherited some existing properties that are prefixed. Some, like -webkit-transform, are standards track and we work with the CSS WG to move ahead those standards while we fix any remaining issues in our implementation and we’ll unprefix them when they’re ready. Others, like -webkit-box-reflect are not standards track and we’ll bring them to standards bodies or responsibly deprecate these on a case-by-case basis. Lastly, we’re not introducing any new CSS properties behind a prefix.
Pinky swear?
Totes. New stuff will be available to experiment with behind a flag you can turn on in about:flags called “Experimental Web Platform Features”. When the feature is ready, it’ll graduate to Canary, and then follow its ~12 week path down through Dev Channel, Beta to all users at Stable.
The Blink prefix policy is documented and, in fact, WebKit just nailed down their prefix policy going forward. If you’re really into prefix drama (and who isn’t!) Chris Wilson and I discussed this a lot more on the Web Ahead podcast [37:20].
How long before we can try Blink out in Chrome?
Blink’s been in Chrome Canary as of the day we announced it. The codebase was 99.9% the same when Blink launched, so no need to rush out and check everything. All your sites should be pretty much the same.
Chrome 27 has the Blink engine, and that’s available on the beta channel for
Win, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS and Android. (See the full beta/stable/dev/canary
view).
While the internals are apt to be fairly different, will there be any radical changes to the rendering side of things in the near future?
Nothing too alarming, layout and CSS stuff is all staying the same. Grid layout is still in development, though, and our Windows text rendering has been getting a new backend that we can hook up soon, greatly boosting the quality of webfont rendering there.
We’re also interested in better taking advantage of multiple cores on machines, so the more we can move painting, layout (aka reflow), and style recalculation to a separate thread, but the faster everyone’s sites will render. We’re already doing multi-threaded painting on ChromeOS and Android, and looking into doing it on Mac & Windows. If you’re interested in these experimental efforts or watching new feature proposals, take a look at the blink-dev mailing list. A recent proposed experiment is called Oilpan, where we’ll look into the advantages of moving the implementation of Chrome’s DOM into JavaScript.
Will features added to Blink be contributed back to the WebKit project? Short term; long term?
Since Blink launched there’s been a few patches that have been landed in both Blink and WebKit, though this is expected to decline in the long-term, as the code bases will diverge.
When are we likely to start seeing Blink-powered versions of Chrome on Android? Is it even possible on iOS, or is iOS Chrome still stuck with a Safari webview due to Apple’s policies?
Blink is now in the Chrome Beta for Android. Chrome for iOS, due to platform limitations, is based on the WebKit-based WebView that’s provided by iOS.
Part of this move seems to be giving Google the freedom to remove old or disused features that have been collecting dust in WebKit for ages. There must be a few things high on that list—what are some of those things, and how can we be certain their removal won’t lead to the occasional broken website?
A few old ’n crusty things that we’re looking at removing: the isindex attribute, RangeException, and XMLHttpRequestException. Old things that have little use in the wild and just haven’t gotten a spring cleaning from the web platform for ages.
Now, we don’t want to break the web, and that’s something that web browser engineers have always been kept very aware of. We carefully gauge real-world usage of things like CSS and DOM features before deprecating anything. At Google we have a copy of the web that we run queries against, so we have a pretty OK idea of what CSS and JavaScript out there is using.
Blink also has over 32,000 tests in its test suite, and manual confirmation that over 100 sites work great before every release ships. And we’re working closely with the W3C and Adobe to share tests and testing infrastructure across browsers, with the goals of reducing maintenance burden, improving interoperability, and increasing test coverage. Eventually we’d like all new features to ship with shared conformance tests, ensuring interoperability even as we add cutting-edge stuff.
Still, any deprecation has to be done responsibly. There’s now a draft Blink process for deprecating features which includes:
- Anonymous metrics to understand how much any specific feature is used “in the wild”
- ”Intent to deprecate” emails that hit blink-dev months before anything is
removed - Warnings that you’ll find in your DevTools console if you’re using anything
deprecated - Mentions on the Chromium blog like this Chrome 27
wrap-up.
Did part of the decision to branch away from WebKit involve resistance to adding a Dart VM? WebKit’s goals explicitly mention JavaScript, and Apple representatives have been fairly vocal about not seeing a need.
Nope, not at all. The decision was made by the core web platform engineers. Introducing a new VM to a browser introduces considerable maintenance cost (we saw this with V8 and JavaScriptCore both in WebKit) and right now Dart isn’t yet ready to be considered for an integration with Blink. (more on that in a sec). Blink’s got strong principles around compatibility risk and this guides a lot of the decisions around our commitments to potential features as they are proposed. You can hear a more complete answer here from Darin Fisher, one of the Chrome web platform leads.
Have any non-WebKit browsers recently expressed an interest in Dart? A
scripting language that only stands to work in one browser sounds a little
VBScript-y.
Not yet, but since Dart compiles to JavaScript and runs across the modern web, it’s not gated by other browsers integrating the VM. But it’s still early days, Dart has not yet reached a stable 1.0 milestone and that there are still technical challenges with the Dart VM around performance and memory management. Still, It’s important to point out that Dart is an open source project, with a bunch of external contributors and committers.
Let me take a moment to provide my own perspective on Dart. 🙂 Now, as you know, I’m a JavaScript guy, so early on, I took a side and and considered Dart an enemy. JavaScript should win; Dart is bad! But then I came to realize the Dart guys aren’t just setting out to improve the authoring and scalability of web application development. They also really want the web to win. Now I’ve recently spoke about how The Mobile Web Is In Trouble, and clarified that my priorities are seeing it provide a fantastic user experience to everyone. For me, seeing the mobile web be successful trumps language wars and certainly quibbling over syntax. So I’m happy to see developers embrace the authoring advantages of Coffeescript, the smart subset of JavaScript strict mode, the legendary Emscripten & asm.js combo, the compiler feedback of TypeScript and the performance ambitions of Dart. It’s worth trying out technologies that can leapfrog the current expectations of the user experience that we can deliver. Our web is worth it.
Will Opera be using the Chromium version of Blink wholesale, as far as you know? Are we likely to see some divergence between Opera and Chrome?
As I understand it, Opera Mobile, Opera Desktop, and Opera Mini will all be based on Chromium. This means that they’ll not only share the exact version of Blink that Chrome uses, but also the same graphics stack, JavaScript engine, and networking stack. Already, Opera has contributed some great things to Blink and we’re excited about what’s next.
Why the name “Blink,” anyway?
Haha. Well… it’s a two parter. First, Blink evokes a certain feeling of speed and simplicity—two core principles of Chrome. Then, Chrome has a little tradition of slightly ironic names. Chrome itself is all about minimizing the browser chrome, and the Chromebook Pixel is all about not seeing any pixels at all. So naturally, it fits that Blink will never support the infamous <blink> tag. 😉
<3z
I wish people would stop picking on the BLINK tag. Not because I liked it but because the guy who created it did it as a joke and didn’t know his team was going to put it into any public implementation. It’s just too easy of a target to try to make yourself look clever by picking on it.
Good stuff. I think I was most excited to read that Google is finally doing something about webfont rendering for Chrome on Windows. Can’t wait to see the results.
Yea the like Michael mentioned the rendering in Chrome on Windows is poor, despite many ‘fixes’ floating around at the moment that technically arent, if this move aids on improving things then its welcomed.
@Christian Z.
It’s not necessarily picking on blink tag per se, but rather always reminding us of the massive social and technical implications that a small change in a browser, even a minor one, can make on the whole web.