satine.org

by Charles Ying

Archive for April, 2013

Google’s fork of WebKit – Blink

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

Google’s official announcement, and developer FAQ.

For sensible commentary about the core mission of Blink and the history leading up to the fork, there’s Alex Russell’s post from Google’s perspective, and Maciej Stachowiak’s comments from Apple’s perspective.

For more detail, there’s the threads between Google (Adam Barth and co.) and Apple (Darin Adler and co.) folks on the WebKit dev mailing lists.

There’s a lot of interesting goals for Blink which I’m excited to see: implementing the DOM in JavaScript; snapshotting in V8; incremental and parallel layout; and multi-process improvements.

I’m also excited to see what Apple is working on, but we’ll need to be patient there as Apple’s style is “show, don’t tell”.

Maciej says it best: “I do not consider Blink to be a hostile fork. I wish the Blink developers good luck & godspeed.”