Wednesday, April 3rd 2013 will be remembered as a sad day for the Internet.
Yesterday, Google announced that they are no longer are going to use WebKit as their rendering engine for Chrome.
WebKit is an open-source web browser engine that Apple originally developed for Safari. This versatile rendering-engine powers Appleโs iOS devices, but has also been incorporated into other browsers (like Blackberryโs new phone browser, Opera, and Chrome) Last year, WebKit finally trumped Internet Explorerโs Trident and Firefoxโs Geico rendering engines as the dominate and most widely used rendering engine. WebKit-based browsers are more popular amongst users, which means Web Developers need to make sure their sites are compatible with WebKit. The hopeโฆ the dream… is that eventually all browsers would have WebKit as their rendering-engine.
That dream has been shattered.
Googleโs Chrome browser is the most used browser on the Internet. By Google making their own rendering engine, they have forked development of WebKit and are inevitably going to cause cross-browser compatibility issues. With a lot of sites still having problems with cross-browser compatibility between WebKit, Trident and Geicoโฆ itโs concerning that Google is adding another rendering engine to the mix. This is bad news for developers but ultimately this is bad news for users.
One of the things I love about working at Blueprint is that our web developers are already looking over the new guidelines for the Blinkย rendering engine for Chrome. I really doubt that most Web Development companies are doing that today (or even aware that this even happened).