The browser wars are back – but this time on mobile as well as the desktop. After long-simmering disagreements with engineers at Apple, Google has split its development of the Chrome browser’s rendering engine for both desktop and mobile from the main line of the open source WebKit project.
That creates a “fork” in the engine which will put it on an increasingly divergent path from other WebKit developers, including Apple, Nokia, and BlackBerry.
For users, growing differences in how the rendering engines work could mean that viewing the same site with different browsers will give different results – especially on mobile.
Google is calling its new rendering engine “Blink” – and admits in a blogpost that “we know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web.” But it adds that it thinks that having multiple rendering engines – the programs that decide how to lay out pages – “will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.” The move means there are now four main rendering engines online: WebKit, Blink, Trident (used in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) and Gecko, used by Mozilla.
Rendering engines figure out how to interpret the HTML, CSS and Javascript that makes up a page, and decide how to lay out the page. They’re the essential subsystem for a browser, onto which elements such as navigation, bookmarking, tabs and so on are overlaid to produce the finished app. The move follows long-simmering disagreement between engineers at Apple and Google over the best way to develop the rendering engine underlying the browser – with one senior Apple engineer saying that Google refused to incorporate key technologies into the main branch of WebKit, keeping them instead for Chrome.
But Google argues that its move means innovation in its browsers can advance more quickly, and independently, without being held back by legacy code. In the blogpost, it says it will remove seven “build systems” and 7,000 files comprising more than 4.5m lines of code. “Over the long term, a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs,” writes Adam Barth, Google’s software engineer.
For web designers who will have to design pages that work with even more rendering engines, the divergence could mean growing problems. Similar troubles occurred early in the development of the commercial web, when Microsoft and Netscape produced their own non-standard adaptations – such as Netscape’s addition of the “blink” tag, which was not adopted by Microsoft.
