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PPK on Blink

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Our good friend PPK has some thoughts on the news that Google will be using a new rendering engine for Chromium called Blink. Blink is a fork of WebKit, so there’s no fear that major rendering changes are going to take place in the near future, but it’s something we should all be paying attention to as Blink starts to forge its own path.

Some of the details we noticed in PPK’s post:

  • Google wasn’t happy with the Apple-driven focus of WebKit development.
  • Opera will be using Blink as well.
  • Blink’s UA string isn’t changing, at least for now.
  • Blink won’t be adding new prefixes; it will maintain the existing -webkit- prefixes until they’re ready to be phased out.
  • You can visit the Chromium Feature Dashboard to keep track of Blink development.

With all the development resources Google will be pulling off of WebKit to work on Blink, WebKit is going to have some scrambling of its own to do, but PPK is generally optimistic about this turn of events. Read his entire post over at QuirksMode.

5 Reader Comments

  1. Not sure where else to post this, so I’ll do it here. It’s a little disconcerting that the site title “A List Apart” is mostly hidden behind a navbar. I assume this is not by design (pun intended). What’s the deal with that? You can see the screenshot here:

    http://oi47.tinypic.com/2ue6x7d.jpg

  3. I’m not so sure about Blink. If Google can optimize and clean up WebKit, they can just as well contribute all of that back into the main branche of WebKit.

    We as developers certainly don’t need yet another engine to worry about. Even if Google promises zero differences in rendering, such promise will not be kept until the end of time. Sooner or later, we will have to be testing on Webkit and Blink separately.

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