Google Chrome to fork WebKit

The browser world is about to see another shakeup as both Google announced they're going to switch to a new rendering engine. Google currently uses WebKit, an open-source rendering engine used by Safari and a bunch of other browsers. In an effort to further streamline its Chrome browser, Google decided it will fork WebKit by introducing Blink, a new open-source rendering engine based on WebKit.

However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

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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.