Google forks WebKit with Blink, a new web engine for Chromium and Chrome (update)

Google forks WebKit with Blink, a new web engine for Chromium and Chrome (update)

You could call WebKit the glue that binds the modern web: the rendering engine powers Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and many mobile browsers past and present. Things are about to unstick a little. Google believes that Chromium’s multi-process approach has added too much complexity for both the browser and WebKit itself, so it’s creating a separate, simpler fork named Blink. Although the new engine will be much the same as WebKit at the start, it’s expected to differ over time as Google strips out unnecessary code and tweaks the underlying platform. We’d also expect it to spread, as the company has confirmed to us that both Chrome and Chrome OS will be using Blink in the future. We’re safely distant from the Bad Old Days of wildly incompatible web engines, but the shift may prove a mixed blessing — it could lead to more advancements on the web, but it also gives developers that much more code to support.

Update: The Next Web has confirmed that Opera, which recently ditched its Presto engine for Webkit, will indeed be using Blink as it’s already hitching its proverbial wagon to Chromium.

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Source: Chromium Blog

Hexxeh ports Chromium OS to the Nexus 7 simply because he can (video)

Hexxeh ports Chromium OS to the Nexus 7 simply because he can video

Coder extraordinaire Hexxeh earned much of his reputation from porting Chromium OS to just about everything, some of his targets more audacious than others. It’s about time he come full circle and port a Google platform to another Google platform, and he just recently did that with a very early Chromium OS conversion for the normally Android-based Nexus 7. Details are scarce other than that WiFi and touch input are working, although that’s really all that’s needed for something so web-centric, isn’t it? We’ll cut Hexxeh some slack when he says he’s in no rush to produce a more easily installed build for Jane and Joe Modder — when he mentions spending hours hacking the OS into the tablet just for fun, he probably deserves some leeway.

[Thanks, yo2boy]

Continue reading Hexxeh ports Chromium OS to the Nexus 7 simply because he can (video)

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Hexxeh ports Chromium OS to the Nexus 7 simply because he can (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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