Google announced today that it is ending its affiliation with Apple over WebKit, which is an open source project that both Google and its arch nemesis have jointly collaborated upon for quite some time. While praising it for its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design, Google says that since Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit based browsers, supporting multiple architectures has slowed down the pace of innovation. So Google introduces Blink, its very own open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
Introducing a new rendering engine can have implications for the web, Google accepts that, but it believes that having multiple rendering engines, like having multiple web browsers, will foster innovation and improve the entire web ecosystem. The changes will be long term, as of now Blink doesn’t bring any major changes for web developers, most of the initial work will focus on simplification of the code base and internal architectural improvements. Google anticipates to remove 7 build systems and get rid of over 7,000 files from the get go. Such a healthy codebase will mean better stability and less bugs in the future.