Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture.<p>Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely.<p>As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list.<p>If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork.<p>That's my two pennies worth.

&#62; Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture.<p>Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.

This reads like:<p>"We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much".<p>A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.

A number of people were complaining about how not enough common implementations on the web was a bad thing; and how everyone using webkit would lead to complacency. Google forking webkit to make it its own might be just enough to keep them all different enough to keep standards going :)

WebKit has prevented google from pulling an IE6, so this effectively frees them to eff it all up.

nugget at the end: "there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser's options page"

My understanding is that Dart VM will be in Chrome soon.

Will this help unshackle WebKit2 development (an alternative to Chrome's multiprocess architecture)? It seems to have stagnated for quite some time.

Some people here are confused about the business side of making a browser for Google. I even saw mentions that Google Chrome is just a good will project to make the Web a better palce.<p>While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it.<p>Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine.<p>For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google.<p>Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money.<p>Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.

&#62; "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"<p>On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.

I like competition but I hate having to test for yet another engine. Really hoping that developing for webkit will still result in well rendered sites/apps on blink.

Noo! Why can't we have one, nice open source target? At least I hope they all support the standards.

Not sure what to make of this statement:<p>"the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages"<p>Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis?<p>Edit: Well it <i>is</i> part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.

They are removing the &#60;blink&#62;&#60;/blink&#62; tag?!? PITCHFORKS OUT

A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ: <a href="http://prng.net/blink-faq.html" rel="nofollow">http://prng.net/blink-faq.html</a>

Google just realizes it cannot pretend to be a nice guy when the world no longer spins around it. So much for "do no evil"...