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Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#51
post #18

Standing ovation. This is most welcomed news since Opera's move to WebKit to keep the current browser innovation pace. Coupled with Mozilla's announcement of its partnership with Samsung to move Servo forward this is great news for the future of the web. Hopefully multi-process/multi-threaded rendering engines will address some of our current performance gripes with the DOM and open the gate for even more complex UIs…

…And Opera is following Chrome to Blink, as new-Opera is built on the Chromium Content API (mentioned below, but seems significant enough to bear repeating).

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#52

The good news is no -blink prefixes! Blink, like Mozilla, will avoid shipping vendor-prefixed features: 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 ... we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the…

I, for one, can't wait to cut 20% of the code in my stylesheets.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#54
I know it might be an unpopular comment, but I really don't like this. I had hoped every browser would eventually use the webkit rendering engine. I have a hard time feeling sorry for those engineers that have to maintain compatibility, when I think of the many frontend engineers that now have to test a different rendering engine :(

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#55

Super excited about this! There was a long discussion on the webkit mailing list after google tried to add support for multiple language VMs in webkit. The goal was to have a native Dart VM. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... If I remember correctly, the patch was not merged in. I guess now google can do whatever it wants!

This is addressed in the FAQ: http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-just... http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features

Additionally: we have had experimental Dart+Chromium builds for a long time, they use a different approach (V8 bindings layer) that doesn't require WebKit changes. However we only use these builds for fast development edit+refresh, for deploying Dart code you should use dart2js (it's just like deploying CoffeeScript, C code via emscripten, etc).

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#56

The good news is no -blink prefixes! Blink, like Mozilla, will avoid shipping vendor-prefixed features: 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 ... we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the…

Finally!

Before anyone starts moaning about incompatibility, let's face it: developers start to rely on new features the moment they're added. Differentiating between different implementations is pointless, since CSS's design means you can specify a property multiple times and your browser will only use the one it understands. The current system also excluded other rendering engines who web developers didn't consider.

So this is a huge win for us, the developers.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#59

I know it might be an unpopular comment, but I really don't like this. I had hoped every browser would eventually use the webkit rendering engine. I have a hard time feeling sorry for those engineers that have to maintain compatibility, when I think of the many frontend engineers that now have to test a different rendering engine :(

Rendering engine monoculture isn't a good thing though. If a single rendering engine dominates, then there is less reason to write standards-compliant code - after all, everyone uses WebKit, right?
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