Google has announced that it will no longer be basing future releases of its Chrome browser on WebKit, the open-source rendering engine that it shares with Apple's Safari.
Instead it will be releasing a fork of WebKit dubbed Blink, which it claims will enable it to speed development of its browser. The move will affect other browsers based on Google's open source Chromium browser, including Opera and Yandex.
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WebKit currently enjoys something like a 40 per cent market share of the browser market, similar to that of Trident - which is deployed by Microsoft Internet Explorer - and twice that of Mozilla's Gecko.
Until now Google Chrome has used the same rendering engine as Safari, BlackBerry, Android, Kindle and Tizen, among others, with WebKit being developed as a joint venture between Apple, BlackBerry, Adobe and other parties.
Google has explained the move as a reaction to the rapid growth of platforms, especially mobile ones, professing itself unhappy with the lack of progress in the WebKit project. It claims that moving away from WebKit will give the firm more flexibility to develop browsers that render pages more accurately and quickly on all platforms.
In initial developments to Blink, Google will remove all platform-specific code as well as making other changes to enable easier development in CSS and JavaScript support.
"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," said Google engineer Adam Barth on his blog on Wednesday.
Barth went on to claim that once work begins on Blink, Google will initially be able to remove 4.5 million lines of code from the WebKit codebase as it simplifies the rendering engine.
Chrome 28 will be the first release of the broswer to use Blink. Opera and Yandex will start using the engine on the release of Chromium 28.
With Google's engineers no longer working on WebKit, there will be a divergence among browsers such as Safari and Chrome, which will put more pressure on Apple to innovate, especially in the fast expanding mobile market.
