When I first saw the headline on PCMag.com about Google switching Chrome's rendering engine from WebKit to something called "Blink," I was almost sure it was another of the company's many April Fool's Day spoofs. But after digging into the background webpages for the project, it became clear that Blink is for real.
Unlike many tech journalists, I normally greet new products from the search giant not as bounteous gifts from a benevolent benefactor, but as a way for the Internet ad behemoth to collect more detailed data about its users. But with Blink, there seems to be no whiff of data-harvesting potential.
Blink is simply about code efficiency—something of paramount importance when you consider that browsing as a human activity is moving from computers to mobile devices, whose processing, memory, and battery capacities are limited. Google engineers have been happy to take the open-source WebKit code for use in its browser for nearly five years, despite the fact that the code was largely engineered by Apple employees. But now, with Google Android's in hot competition on the mobile side against Apple's iPhones and iPads, the opportunistic use of WebKit has run its course. Well, not entirely, since Blink will still be based on WebKit, as a new "forked" version.
As Google engineers argued, there's a slew of Apple-specific code in WebKit that serves no purpose for Chrome. The first step of the Blink team, according to the projects webpages, is to slash away 4.5 million lines of unneeded code in Webkit, while leaving its essential webpage-rendering code untouched. This approach is laudable, and should also allay worries about compatibility with existing sites, as should the Google engineers claim in a blog post that a goal of the Blink project is to maintain compatibility with existing websites and apps. A pledge to work with other browser makers is also reassuring, but does that mean working with Mozilla and Opera but not with Microsoft and Apple?
It's a Google Web
With the majority of phones now running Android, will we see sites that only display correctly in that OS and others that only display correctly in Apple iOS's Safari browser? Another worry, actually a bigger-picture Web landscape worry, is that more Google services will only run in Chrome. We've seen this before. Try getting Gmail notifications to work in any browser but Chrome, for example. Giving Google control over Web standards will result in a monoculture we haven't seen since IE6. For an even more cynical indictment of Blink, read developer Rob Isaac's Short Translation from BS to English of Google's Blink documentation.
The Google Chrome team's blog post said that "in the short term, Blink will bring little change for Web developers." It's that "short term" that worries me. Does that mean that later on, you'll have to adjust your site code for Blink, or else forget about it working in all those hundreds of millions of Android devices and Chrome desktop browsers? We can hope that won't be the eventual outcome of Blink, but hoping doesn't always work.