The Evolution of the Web

May 11, 2013

The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink

Posted by Vijith Assar

The Web browser you’re probably using to read this article is a small marvel of engineering. It can be broken down into many discrete parts—a URL bar, a set of bookmarks, perhaps a built-in video player. But the most important component is hidden: the “rendering engine” is the specific part of the program which ingests the hypertext-markup language, or HTML—the invisible stream of code downloaded when you arrive a specific Internet address—and turns it into a visible Web page that can be drawn and displayed on the device’s screen. Without the rendering engine, nothing else would matter; rendering engines determine the shape of the Web as we perceive it.
On April 3rd, just a hair shy of four and a half years after Google unveiled its Web browser, Chrome—now the most popular desktop browser in the world by some counts—Google announced that future versions of it will switch from the popular rendering engine WebKit to a new custom engine, called Blink. (WebKit notably powers Apple’s Safari, along with most popular mobile browsers.) For now, Blink remains an almost-identical copy of WebKit (which is allowed because WebKit’s code is open source), but in the near future it will be refined by Google’s team into a new, lightweight engine that is fast, efficient, stable, and feature-rich. For Google, this will better facilitate the browser’s integration in alternative emerging contexts, like Android smartphones and its new Glass wearable computing device. Blink is expected to start powering Chrome by this June.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-evolution-of-the-web-in-a-blink.html