Google Forks WebKit and Launches Blink ⇥ techcrunch.com

April 3, 2013: the day of big browser news. Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch:

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

As someone who yearns for better performance across the web, this is fantastic. As a non-Chrome user, this doesn’t really affect me. As a front-end web developer, I’m holding back frustration. But, hey, Blink doesn’t add a vendor prefix. Steve Streza:

No more vendor prefixes, though. -webkit-no-more-vendor-prefixes. -moz-no-more-vendor-prefixes. -ms-no-more-vendor-prefixes.

It’s one more thing to test for, and one more thing to debug. And it’s based on the same fifteen-year-old code that WebKit is based on, so it’s not nearly as ambitious as Servo is. Still, this is beneficial to Google in the short term.

Update: Looks like Opera will be using Blink, not WebKit, as originally stated.