As you are probably aware Google has forked Webkit and will be calling their fork Blink. Google does not intend to re-merge with the main project at any point in the future and is signaling that they will be adding new features to their rendering engine. As a developer who often has to work on the web or mobile web this is very interesting but also a little concerning.
Currently, Blink and Webkit are just about identical, so we can still feel secure in our Webkit “monoculture”, but the situation will likely change in a year or less. Even if Google makes an effort, as some have suggested that they might, to not break standards or chooses not to push Blink specific features, web developers are still going to have to deal with yet another rendering engine. Sure we’ve already been dealing with a number of them and have gotten used to having to append our CSS with “–webkit” or “–moz”, but Google is not adding a “–blink”. Instead, developers will have to dig into a settings screen to enable or disable functionality. Bottom line there is that there will be Blink specific functionality that some developers will likely want to user; for example currently NACL only works on Chrome and Dart VM works best on Chrome – in other browsers code written in Dart has to translated into traditional JavaScript. There are also a number of rumors floating around that Blink may focus on optimizing HTML5 graphics performance on ARM devices.
The question really becomes not what Google is going to do with Blink but rather what are the rest of the Webkit team going to do without them? Google and Apple have been the driving forces around the project and more and more Google has been taking point on a lot of the more cutting edge issues; for example, Google has been pushing performance more than any other contributor to the project but, for the most part, Apple and others have been able to benefit from Google’s efforts thanks to the free software nature of the project’s license. Given Apple’s less than enthusiastic embrace of developers using web technologies to develop for their platforms, it seems unlikely that they would be inclined to match Google’s pace. In a lot of ways, give that Apple’s business model is to sell expensive hardware, a good browser is just another feature on an Apple device, however, for Google, the browser is the primary platform.
Progress is a good thing for web and I am confident that Google’s decisions will yield web developers some pretty cool tech to work with, but there is also the risk that web developers will start relying on those tools too much and we will end up back in an IE 6 / ActiveX situation. Questions? Comments? Dogmatic rage? Please feel free to contact me on Google+ or Twitter. This post was brought to you by Code Journal for Mac.
