Yesterday Google released a statement on their Chromium blog that they are creating a new rendering engine based on Webkit called Blink. I encourage everyone to go and read the big news. This is clearly big news for web developers, as another rendering engine on the market means more browser variance to keep in mind when testing.
They say that for the time being, we won’t have to worry about any major changes.
In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.
Adam Barth, Software Engineer
Once they do start the ball rolling in making Blink what they want it to be, it should prove to be a great step for Chrome. The Developer FAQ on the Blink project page in Chromium sheds some light on the major questions we all undoubtedly have like will we be getting a new vendor prefix (e.g. -blink-box-shadow)? Looks like the answer is no to that, thankfully.
This news will definitely stir up the web dev community, but hopefully we’ll see that it’s a change for the better.
