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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

#62

Post by gsnedders »

mtgx wrote: post #33
gsnedders wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it just means that instead of Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS having different versions of WebKit, Chrome for Android will use Blink and Chrome for iOS will use the system WebKit, as it does now.

So Google will be using 2 increasingly different rendering engines for Chrome in the future? Well that sucks. Apple really needs to allow other rendering engines on iOS, or at least be forced into it. People complain about the "webkit mono-culture", but a huge platform like iOS actually mandating you use webkit, and their single version of webkit, is a lot worse.

They already are different: Chrome on iOS uses whatever version of WebKit UIWebView uses on the platform (which, until relatively recently, was an old fork of WebKit), whereas Chrome on Android nowadays uses a version almost as up to date as Chrome on desktop.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#66

Post by MatthewPhillips »

bmuon wrote: 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…

Parallelism is listed as something they are considering, whereas with Servo it's one of the biggest (if not the main) reasons for it existing. From this announcement I can't quite tell what it is with this project that they hope to achieve but I'm sure that will become more clear over time.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#67

Post by macrael »

mythz wrote: post #27

Alex Russell has a good analysis about the move: http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/

The argument is essentially: "It took up lots of engineering time and effort to maintain compatibility with other platforms, so this allows us not to worry about other platforms and only focus on our own and that will allow us to move faster."

Hopefully this is easier for everyone. If the chrome multithreading architecture really was the pain point then does that mean that webkit will also be deleting thousands of files and become easier to build, just as the chrome team is removing compatibility for other webkit targets? Or will WebKit remain the mess it is now because it strives to work on all the other platforms?

What if Apple decided to do the same thing? WebKit is this wonderful open source success story in part because it runs in so many places on so many things, but isn't a large part of that only enabled because the main contributors took the time to make sure that their work continued to run on the various different architectures? Will Google turn away patches that enable Blink to be compatible with platforms not their own?

This is an interesting move.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#70

Post by natem345 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #59
oellegaard wrote: post #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 :(

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?

Just like everyone used IE6 back in the day!
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