Google's Blink Rendering Engine For Webkit Browsers To Re-Kindle The Browser Wars

WebKit has become something of a common engine powering a lot of browsers these days, but one could argue that Android is also powering a lot of devices these days, despite the fact that things like the Kindle Fire look nothing like Android. So today, Google's announcing a fork of its own. As platforms evolve and mature, we're seeing a trend -- the initial platform hits, and eventually, various parties find different ways to exploit it. Eventually, you end up with different end products with some of the same underlying technologies powering things.


With Chrome, WebKit has been powering things on the render side. But now, Blink is being introduced to take things from here. Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and Google says that "supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects." Blink is being revealed to help that, and it's described as an open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase, but it'll no doubt impact the browser world in the coming months and years. Now, let the battle for mainstream support begin.