Google announced would-be hard knock news on forking WebKit early April, signalling the beginning of work on its own rendering engine for Chrome, Blink. WebKit emerged in 2001 out of KHTML as an open-source rendering engine, whose flexibility and performance have endeared it to many web technology vendors including Google.WebKit has kept pace with the growing capabilities of the web platform, thanks to the great open-source community who have been contributing in its development.
Why would Google want to discontinue using WebKit rendering engine? Despite the fact that WebKit has thrived in supporting the emerging web technologies, it has slowed down the pace of innovations owing to its complexity, hence the need to introduce a more streamline version, Blink.
Blink is based on WebKit with internal architectural improvements and simplification of the code-base, leading to more stability and fewer bugs. And which will be easier to make proposed specifications work in both WebKit and Blink. However, there is the fear that the common code-base could lead to some problems in recommending new standards.
But, the increased competition would lead to more focus on standards, meaning better browsing experience, which is a win win for the web and individual users.
Blink is expected to be turned on by default in Chrome 28, though it's already available as part of the Canary build for developers and early adopters who want to give it a spin.
