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Technology: Google's Chrome Cuts Cord from WebKit
If you’re a web developer, you have undoubtedly experienced the pain of creating a web application that is compatible across browsers. Having to support Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 6/7/8/9/10 browsers can be an enormous challenge. Browsers need to be able to read, interpret and render the HTML, CSS and Javascript code that describes a web page, but each browser has peculiarities in how it decides to ultimately serve up the page. The requirement of needing to support browsers that can run on anywhere from large high-resolution desktop monitors to smaller form factors found on devices like laptops, tablets, and smart phones only complicates a developers job.
Browsers have been built around core rendering engines, of which the three most prominent are Gecko, as used in Mozilla Firefox, Trident used by Microsoft in Internet Explorer, and the Open Source WebKit which has been used by Apple in Safari and Google in Chrome. In February, Opera announced that it will move from it’s own proprietary rendering engine called Presto to WebKit. WebKit has been looked on increasingly as the standard for web browsers, reaching about 40 percent of the browser market.
But there are big changes ahead for browsers. Google has announced in early April that it is forking WebKit. The new forked project will be called Blink. It will start with the current WebKit base but gradually diverge from that project. Google engineers cite an increasing need for them to support legacy capabilities in WebKit and a difficulty of using WebKit for the multiprocess architecture that’s used in Chrome. By shedding some of the code in WebKit, Google engineers believe that they can create a more performant system. And shed they will. Google plans to initially drop about 7000 files consisting of 4.5 million lines of code with the switch to Blink.
Al Hilwa, a research program director at IDC, told TechNewsWorld, that “It is clear that there are political and strategic, as well as technical motivations for the move. Typically, market leaders do not like to depend on each other for strategically important components of their platforms. In this case, Google cuts the cord with Apple on WebKit, and the browser is a hugely important part of the platform. for Google, doing this is key for strategic independence.”
Separately, Mozilla also has announced that they plan to team with Samsung in the development of yet another browser rendering engine called Servo with the main goal of better supporting parallel computing with machines having multiple cores.
