Google Announces Its Forking WebKit to Create New 'Blink' Rendering Engine

Google has announced that it's forking WebKit to create a new open source rendering engine called 'Blink'.

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 - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

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.


According to the company, they will be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files comprising of more than 4.5 million lines of code right off the bat.

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