Chromium is forking webkit; new rendering engine named blink

Community
1

Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
[URL=“http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html”]

I wonder if this means that some of the long-standing CSS and Javascript webkit bugs can finally be fixed…

[edit]: Also: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/google-going-its-own-way-forking-webkit-rendering-engine/

2

That would be nice. I fear new ones may be created, too. :rolleyes: I like the thought of huge amounts of redundant code and files being removed from Chrome, though.

3

I don’t know how much of a fork it is… so I don’t know if it’ll fix bugs like https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17450 or simply not have them at all.

Alex Russel has a thought about it: http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/ where he states that Webkit was kinda holding the Chromium project/Chrome back.

4

I still don’t really understand the reasons for this, generally forking open source projects is bad.

5

Why?

6

It divides the project, the community and the effort.

7

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Here’s a quick list of some successful forks:

  • Ubuntu was a fork of Debian
  • LibreOffice was a fork of OpenOffice
  • Webkit was a fork of KHTML
  • KompoZer was a fork of NVU
  • Wordpress was a fork of b2/CafeLog
  • Zen Cart was a fork of osCommerce
  • TrueCrypt was a fork of E4M
  • Inkscape was a fork of Sodipodi

Obviously some of these forks are pretty well known.

There are plenty of projects that went on to be successful after being forked. As for reasons why–they tend to vary: project mismanagement, a project going dormant, changes in direction/focus, technical limitations, or changes in the scope from the original project.

[edit]: on an unrelated note, here’s a blog post that offers a more direct and better explanation of the reasons for the Blink fork: http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/