Blink! Google Is Forking WebKit 252
Carewolf writes "In a blog post titled Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project, Google has announced that Chromium (the open source backend for Chrome) will be switching to Blink, a new WebKit-based web rendering engine. Quoting: '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... This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem. ... In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll 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. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.'"
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
Notably, the norm when forking is to do so because you think you can take the project in a new and interesting direction, and the generally accepted process is to make your changes as easy to integrate and work with for the original developers as possible. In fact, Apple got a very bad rap for forking (because they thought they could take the project in a new direction), and then making it difficult to integrate their code back into KHTML. Here, google are forking exactly to make it difficult for the original authors to integrate their code, not to take things in a new direction. Given the bad rap Apple (rightly) got about this, I'd suggest it would be the hight of hypocrisy to not give google a much harder time over a worse transgression.
WebKit (TM) (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet it has nothing to do with the fact that "WebKit" became a registered trademark of Apple less than a month ago.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/03/apples-webkit-is-now-a-registered-trademark-in-the-us.html
Re:I wonder if blink will still identify itself @ (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is exactly why CSS preprocessors were invented (ok, at least part of the reason).
Anyone that is using prefixes all over their style sheets is doing it wrong. It's so much simpler to simply use `border-radius: 5px` than to have to deal with `-webkit-border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px;` .... etc.
Just stick whatever prefixes you think you're going to need this month inside the mixin for `border-radius` and let the preprocessor handle all that prefix garbage.
Of course, you could always just be an asshole like me and completely ignore the fact that prefixes even exist.
IE did it first (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
For reference, the WebKit team's main page for WebKit2 [webkit.org] describes some of the differences between its approach and the approach that Google took when developing their own process architecture. It more or less struck me as an indication that WebKit2 would be a point of divergence for Apple and the people switching to WebKit2, and for Google, which would likely stick with WebKit and their investment in the architecture that they had already developed. Apple switched from using WebKit to WebKit2 in Safari quite some time ago, though by all indications it has not yet done so with iOS.
The fact that forking WebKit will likely allow Google to drop support for iOS (among other platforms) as they add more features and establish a competitive advantage for themselves is more than likely a larger motivating factor than this, but it's still something worth considering.
Re:I wonder if blink will still identify itself @ (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe someone who missed blinks and marquees wanted to name it after the famous Dr. Who episode....