Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday, at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million… → Read More
Google’s announcement that it would fork WebKit to develop its own Blink browser engine was definitely a surprise and the repercussions of this move for the browser ecosystem as a whole are still unclear. Today, about two weeks after Google’s announcement, Vincent Hardy, Adobe’s director of engineering for the company’s Web Platform team, announced that, in addition to… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — spent a too-quick hour on Facebook Home, Twitter’s new deep linking Cards, and the jousting over Webkit. Individually, these developments represent interesting strategy for the major notification platforms of Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook. But taken together, we’re seeing an… → Read More
Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium… → Read More
Web browser company Opera Software, now 300 million users strong, caught the world off guard the other week when it announced that it would be ditching its own Presto framework and moving instead to Google’s WebKit to power its mobile and desktop browsers. In an interview with TechCrunch today, Opera’s CEO Lars Boilesen said that the decision has freed up the company to innovate in a way that it… → Read More
The news that Opera is shutting down the development of its own browser rendering engine and moving to the open source WebKit engine cause quite a stir earlier this week. With WebKit powering the built-in browsers of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, it’s already the de-facto standard engine for the mobile and it has the potential to do the same on the desktop. Worldwide, Chrome now holds a … → Read More
Earlier this week, Opera announced that it would stop working on its own Presto layout engine and switch to WebKit. It’s obvious that the open source WebKit engine currently has a lot of momentum behind it, with Google, Apple and now Opera backing it. As Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich wrote last night, however, don’t expect Mozilla to switch engines anytime soon. Mozilla, thanks to its not-for-profit… → Read More
Browser maker Opera plans to move to using the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for “most” upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers. Its first WebKit product is likely to be a browser for Android — due to be previewed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona later this month — with desktop and other products following. → Read More
Apple and Google still represent the bulk of reviewed commits contributing to the ongoing development of WebKit, the open source web browser engine that powers Safari and Chrome, among others. Google accounts for the bulk of commits, having overtaken Apple in that regard back in 2009 (though Apple still does much more with fewer authors actually writing code), but the more interesting story here… → Read More
Long ago, before Chrome existed for OS X (so, 2009) my browser of choice was Camino. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, it’s an open-source project that zero people work on full-time. And it’s only available on the Mac. In fact, if you have heard of it, it may be as the other browser Mozilla makes. And its future is now at a crossroads.
As the team lays out in a post on their blog, a… → Read More
Sure, Apple and Google are at war, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help one another out from time to time. Especially with regard to WebKit, the rendering engine that both use in their Safari and Chrome web browsers. That’s exactly what happened yesterday with the latest stable build of Chrome.
According to this post on the Google Chrome Releases blog, Apple gets credit for two of the eleven… → Read More
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.
Now, the author is quick to point out… → Read More
Google made a very minor but significant change to their search homepage earlier this week. While everybody else was distracted by the barcode logo, a few Chrome and Safari users may have noticed that the search buttons now have a certain zing to them, a new and pretty look, with slightly rounded corners, a border around them and a cool looking gradient.
Now, before you think or say, “baa baa… → Read More
There is no question that mobile browsing is taking off. The latest data from Opera shows that nearly 32 million people used its Opera Mini mobile browser in August, 2009, a 147 percent increase over the year before. In terms of pageviews, Opera Mini delivered 13.9 billion last month, a 235 percent annual increase. That means that each person is loading 436 pages a month on their cell phones… → Read More
Will Google Chrome signal the end of Firefox’s “geek” domination? That is, will Chrome one day replace Firefox as the computer savvy user’s browser of choice? Maybe, friends. Maybe. Reasons? Chrome is faster, it’s newer (who doesn’t love a shiny, new toy?) and it’s architecturally better—a YouTube tab crash doesn’t bring down the entire browser. → Read More
Using Google Chrome? Pat yourself on the back, since you’re one of the few. There here chart shows the downward trend of Chrome usage. As you might guess, the browser peaked within a few days of its launch; it’s been steady to slightly downhill ever since then in early September. As I said before, for many of the benefits of Google Chrome, save multi-threading, you may want to pick up… → Read More
Are you a Mac user with Google Chrome envy? You really shouldn’t be, especially now that the latest builds of WebKit use a ridiculously fast Javascript engine called SquirrelFish Extreme. The new engine, conveniently shortened to SFE, is actually faster than Chrome Javascript engine, V8. (It’s actually faster than the version of V8 currently floating around SVN, which is faster than… → Read More
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