Blink. Did you miss it? WebKit has been forked again, this time by Google

I can’t wait to see the barrage of feedback from the Web community around the news that Chrome/Chromium will be powered by a true fork of WebKit (not just a slightly different fork 😉 called Blink.

It is interesting to remember that WebKit != a “browser”, as Paul Irish foreshadowed (interesting that he did that before the announcement ;).

I predict some people making fun claims such as:

OMG We were loving that there was just WebKit with no bugs!

Much has been said about the fact that there is not “one WebKit”.

Joe Hewitt commented on the fact that Chrome is “behind” on some features such as CSS hyphens…. I wonder how much of that will come into play with Blink. It again shows that there wasn’t “one WebKit” (HINT: CSS hyphens != just a WebKit issue).

If you admit that there isn’t one WebKit anymore, then you can come to a conclusion that if Google does a great job here, Blink could move the Web forward faster, which could be good for us all, even if we feel like we have to “test a lil more”.

OMG Google is going for POWER!

People love a power play (love to hate mostly). If you think that WebKit was perfect, remember that it isn’t. With Opera switching to WebKit we saw some more truth come out. For example the jQuery folks talking about the myriad of bugs and work arounds, and how there are more for WebKit than for IE!

Give me my WebView! Where I hope this leads

If I may put on an optimistic hat for a second, I can get excited about this news along with having Android report into Sundar Pichai.

If:

a) Blink starts to move faster than WebKit and/or helps spur on WebKit and other rendering engines (e.g. Firefox OS / Gecko)

b) Blink becomes a key part of a new WebView component on Android (and iOS! :/)

Amazing things can happen.

I want the WebView component to be self updatable, and then I can build a hybrid app that targets a version of said WebView. At that point we can update the renderer/other WebView pieces separately from the OS itself and the Web can pick up the pace.

PLEASE DO THIS GOOGLE. PLEASE PROVE ME RIGHT. How about at Google I/O?