This is something I've not seen discussed here on DP, and I think given the ramifications for those of us building websites it might not be a bad idea to get something started. For those of you who missed it: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html http://www.chromium.org/blink The bits of webkit that are Apple OS specific do add to the complexity, and really aren't needed by other browsers, even on OSX (long story there, but much as Windows uses Trident for a LOT of OS stuff, OSX and iOS rely on Webkit) so leaning out the code for faster core changes will be a good thing for Chrome and Opera. Yes, I said Opera. http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/ A lot of people got their panties in a wad when Opera announced it was going webkit -- I was one of the few looking forward to it since I've said for ages I'd like to see a user interface as useful and capable as Opera with a Webkit engine; Never thought they'd take me seriously. (seriously, every other browser UI feels like a rinky incomplete tinkertoy to me) Opera going to Google's fork of Webkit just makes sense as they don't need the extra heft Apple has for use as part of their OS. It lets them leverage a whole slew of things that are likely better than they could come up with on their own in terms of sandboxing, hardware acceleration (something they've been struggling with bugs on since Opera 10 and still have to leave disabled by default), ... and by all reports Opera has already contributed code back to Webkit, and now Blink. The fork also means that the news of Opera going over resulting in one less engine, is offset by the creation of a new one... and it will be a new one as the forks diverge... just like KHTML to webkit.... or Mosaic to both Nyetscape and Internet Exploder. Oh, and for those of us making websites -- GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! Blink is following Mozilla's suit and doing away with browser prefixes, hiding 'experimental' features that should NOT be used on websites behind a config switch. I applaud this move as vendor prefixes were a dumb idea from day one, just begging to recreate what made IE such a pain to work with the past decade and a half.
I'd always hoped Opera would release Presto open source, though this is still good news as both Opera and Google are companies that will keep on the cutting edge. Can't find a press release by Opera though. Oh, and call me when IE does the same.