Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

Claims that new "Blink" engine will allow faster innovation for all WebKit users.

Read the whole story

 

[ws3]

Awesome. Two new web engines in one day.

 

[kleinma]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

 

[Tom Brokaw]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

Until they decide the beta is not performing well and kill it.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Is Blink going to be open source so people can use Google's improvements in their own browser projects?

 

[Ryoshi]

This is actually kind of exciting - ever since Opera decided to move to WebKit it's seemed like there really weren't any solid alternatives anymore. Hopefully Google can clean it up enough to make it worth it.

 

[stoanhart]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

Won't happen. Blink has to be open source because it's a fork of an open source project. Any proprietary features can be copied into other browsers. Also, Google has a good track record of working with the W3C to have its technologies become certified Web Standards.

 

[DanNeely]

What's this going to do to Opera? Their plan was to fork google's downstream version of webkit and bolt their own GUI on top.

 

[Happysin]

Is Blink going to be open source so people can use Google's improvements in their own browser projects?

WebKit is GPL, right? They have to keep it open-source.

 

[loudergood]

What's this going to do to Opera? Their plan was to fork google's downstream version of webkit and bolt their own GUI on top.

They're likely going to hop on the blink train.

 

[zneak]

Won't happen. Blink has to be open source because it's a fork of an open source project. Any proprietary features can be copied into other browsers. Also, Google has a good track record of working with the W3C to have its technologies become certified Web Standards.

This won't happen because Blink is a fork of a LGPL project. It's not because it's open source that forks systematically have to be open source as well.

 

[lieutenantmudd]

Blink is a pretty good name.

Good luck to Google.

 

[LinkTiger]

Webkit's LGPL may dictate that the project be open source, stoanhart, but that doesn't mean they need to do their development in the open. Google conducts its Android development in secret, and much of that is based on the stronger copyleft of the GPL. We have no reason to believe that Google will behave any better with Blink than they have with Android.

 

[blacke]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

From Google's own announcement:
Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

 

[hubick]

Couldn't they have just formed a joint working group to create a merged process model with the best of both designs?

 

[Happysin]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

Won't happen. Blink has to be open source because it's a fork of an open source project. Any proprietary features can be copied into other browsers. Also, Google has a good track record of working with the W3C to have its technologies become certified Web Standards.

This does nothing to solve the "proprietary" problem. If Google starts implementing non-standard Chrome-specific features, they can become a de-facto standards body by trying to push these without the W3C. This also may not be of any use to non-WebKit browsers like Firefox and IE.

Furthermore, Google has very recently been pushing Swift and their non CalDAV calendaring for their specific implementations. It stands to reason they would start pushing out these Google-specific technologies to Chrome in a way to make them native.

Last time that happened, we called it ActiveX, and was pretty-much terrible.

 

[Solidstate89]

Great, one more set of vendor-specific CSS prefixes to have to start using soon, just to make sure that my sites looks the same in all browsers

Of particular interest to Web developers: there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes

 

[Shnitz]

Opera is also using Blink BTW,

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/

 

[Bad Monkey!]

Great, one more set of vendor-specific CSS prefixes to have to start using soon, just to make sure that my sites looks the same in all browsers

Or, you could just not use vendor prefixes on production websites at all, just as it was intended to be.

 

[Midnitte]

Webkit's LGPL may dictate that the project be open source, stoanhart, but that doesn't mean they need to do their development in the open. Google conducts its Android development in secret, and much of that is based on the stronger copyleft of the GPL. We have no reason to believe that Google will behave any better with Blink than they have with Android.

I'd imagine they'd operate as they do now with WebKit...

 

[OldManBrodie]

Great, one more set of vendor-specific CSS prefixes to have to start using soon, just to make sure that my sites looks the same in all browsers

Of particular interest to Web developers: there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes

Reading comprehension FTW! :sheepish:

Though, I can't say that I completely take them at their word...

 

[JSawyer]

Presto is gone, but we won't be getting Webkit monopoly. Nice

 

[BugblatterII]

Diversity is generally good. However diversity in how browsers render webpages is bad.

If they adhere closely to the various standards then this may not produce another headache for web developers, but there'll always be the temptation for them to 'do a Microsoft'.

 

[nebrius]

Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture.

That was my first thought when reading this.

Of particular interest to Web developers: there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes

Then I read this. If Blink is going to pretend to be "more or less" webkit, then I can see a lot of web devs just sticking with the webkit monoculture, since all the webkit browsers are already "more or less" webkit. I dislike the concept of css prefixes in general, but if we're going to use them, then we should use them properly, and I don't think that this is the proper approach. It will work fine for now, but as webkit2 and blink diverge (and I'm pretty certain they will), life will get harder and harder for web devs IMO.

 

[doubleyewdee]

Great, one more set of vendor-specific CSS prefixes to have to start using soon, just to make sure that my sites looks the same in all browsers

Of particular interest to Web developers: there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes

Specifically from their project page:

Historically, browsers have relied on vendor prefixes (e.g., -webkit-feature) to ship experimental features to web developers. This approach can be harmful to compatibility because web content comes to rely upon these vendor-prefixed names. Going forward, instead of enabling a feature by default with a vendor prefix, we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the “enable experimental web platform features” flag in about:flags until the feature is ready to be enabled by default. Mozilla has already embarked on a similar policy.

 

[passivesmoking]

Are we allowed to make jokes about Google telling Apple to fork off, or will that get me fired?

 

[DrPizza]

Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture.

That was my first thought when reading this.

Of particular interest to Web developers: there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes

Then I read this. If Blink is going to pretend to be "more or less" webkit, then I can see a lot of web devs just sticking with the webkit monoculture, since all the webkit browsers are already "more or less" webkit. I dislike the concept of css prefixes in general, but if we're going to use them, then we should use them properly, and I don't think that this is the proper approach. It will work fine for now, but as webkit2 and blink diverge (and I'm pretty certain they will), life will get harder and harder for web devs IMO.

This is a much, much better approach. It means that developers can test experimental behaviour in private, but it means that they cannot be used to contaminate the public Web.

 

[Kevinv]

wonder what this means for the iOS Chrome app.

 

[koolraap]

Deleting 4.5 million lines of code? Man, I wish I clicking Commit on that one. Deleting code is a great feeling.

 

[alanmies]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

You mean like -webkit -prefixes?

 

[doubleyewdee]

This is a much, much better approach. It means that developers can test experimental behaviour in private, but it means that they cannot be used to contaminate the public Web.

Minus the rash of semi-pro made sites that just tell their users to "turn on experimental features plz."

Won't be everywhere, for sure, but I suspect you'll see sites with this very soon.

 

[MattEvansC3]

Cue stream of proprietary google technologies that will flow into this and only work on chrome. Google's argument will be "well chrome is available on every single platform so just use chrome". Yay.

From Google's own announcement:
Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

Is that the same way they collaborated with the industry, especially Nokia, to make VP8 a standard?

 

[koolraap]

This is a much, much better approach. It means that developers can test experimental behaviour in private, but it means that they cannot be used to contaminate the public Web.

Want to bet 1 GBP or 1 AUD that Chrome version 35 or so enables that feature by default?