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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Google announced today that the company is forking the WebKit rendering engine to create its own web rendering engine called 'Blink'. Google had been the using Apple-initiated WebKit project to power its Chrome web browser. Future versions, however, will now be based on this new system.

Google is now free to make changes to its rendering engine with less complexity and bureaucracy than when it was saving its changes to Webkit. The company posted this on its FAQ explaining why it wanted to create a new engine:
The main reason is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. So, over the years, supporting multiple architectures has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium communities, slowing down the collective pace of innovation.
With the change, Google has set Chrome and Apple's Safari on their own paths. Webkit was originally created by Apple as a fork to the KHTML rendering engine. Apple took interest in developing it when launching Safari for the Mac, and it now powers Safari for iOS, as well.

WebKit has been heavily adopted with over 20 companies now contributing to the project. Google and Apple, however, have remained the most active contributors to the open-source project.

commits.png
In fact, Google has been the most active contributor of WebKit in the recent years. This graph from Bitergia (above) shows Google's increasing number of "commits" to WebKit over the years. Google's efforts will now be directed at 'Blink'. Apple has made no public comments about the news.

Article Link: Google Forking WebKit to Create New Web Rendering Engine for Chrome
 

longofest

Editor emeritus
Jul 10, 2003
2,924
1,682
Falls Church, VA
It will be interesting to see how many folks follow Google and jump ship to support the new fork or stick with Apple and Webkit.

It was nice to have two major companies on the same core engine for as long as it lasted.
 

alksion

macrumors 68000
Sep 10, 2010
1,715
114
Orange County CA
With Opera adopting Webkit recently, I figured this would be the new standard that would minimize the fragmentation.

I guess Google wants to keep things similar to their Android OS ;)
 

maxosx

macrumors 68020
Dec 13, 2012
2,385
1
Southern California
This is a good move on Google's part. It will bring enhanced, richer results to all. The mentality at Google is improve, improve, improve. While certainly not perfect, I give them credit for a positive attitude and willingness to take risks.
 

macrumors12345

Suspended
Mar 1, 2003
410
0
This might be more meaningful if Samsung weren't moving towards Rust (Mozilla's next generation rendering engine). At this point Samsung's decisions have a bigger impact on the mobile browser market than Google's decisions.

I guess it will eventually impact Chrome for Desktop though, for whatever that's worth.
 

Karma*Police

Suspended
Jul 15, 2012
2,503
2,828
Sounds like another attempt by Google to control the keys to the Internet using open source as a veil to their true intentions. It reminds me of when they tried to hijack the video standard with WebM.
 

nagromme

macrumors G5
May 2, 2002
12,546
1,196
As a bizarre consequence of this, will Apple once again have a reason to make Safari for Windows?

This is a good move on Google's part. It will bring enhanced, richer results to all. The mentality at Google is improve, improve, improve. While certainly not perfect, I give them credit for a positive attitude and willingness to take risks.

Agreed. Google has a laser focus on serving their customers better and better: advertisers eager to pay for personal data. (What's Google's default setting for Do Not Track?)
 

trunten

macrumors regular
Feb 17, 2007
193
39
This might be more meaningful if Samsung weren't moving towards Rust (Mozilla's next generation rendering engine). At this point Samsung's decisions have a bigger impact on the mobile browser market than Google's decisions.

I guess it will eventually impact Chrome for Desktop though, for whatever that's worth.

Justo be clear, the article states that Rust is the programming language that the new engine dubbed 'Servo' is being written in
 

samcraig

macrumors P6
Jun 22, 2009
16,779
41,982
USA
If Google was a very active participant in WebKit over the years - while some may scoff at Google going in their own direction and wish them ill on their endeavor or mock them. Consider that WebKit won't benefit from their tweaking any more.

Things will get interesting.
 

japanime

macrumors 68030
Feb 27, 2006
2,914
4,835
Japan
If it results in even an even more seamless integration with Google's various web-based services, then this could be a very good thing.
 
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