Blink rendering engine for Chromium, fork of WebKit has been landed on Chrome 28 dev./canary channels and available for testing. At present you can’t really spot/see any difference the way Chrome works with Blink as Google developers working on it and Chrome says on availability of it for Chrome as “very beginning, its really nothing that different from WebKit”
Why Google wants to use Blink instead of WebKit?
“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” says Chrome team in blog post.
Blink to make Chrome more stable with healthier codebase with lesser bugs
“In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.”
How to Check/know Chrome is using Blink?
If you’re using Chrome canary or Deva build type “Chrome://version” (without quotes) in address bar of any one of them and press enter. Here browser should suppose to display Blink name in place of AppleWebKit, at present its not! don’t know the reason why?. May be transition from WebKit to Blink fully not complete?.
Some users on Dev. builds already seeing rough edges of Blink where few users reported tabs titles not being centered and their tabs are jittering or bouncing.
Have you spotted any significant changes in behavior on dev./canary build of Chrome with Blink? what are they? let me know them in comments.
Update: Chrome 28 dev. now showing blink as rendering engine, new screenshot has been uploaded to reflect this change.