Who owns webkit

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. 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 br. However building your own engine allows you to more easily innovate and build things to directly suit the needs of your browser.

This appears to be the main reason why Google has now decided that the time is right to branch out and create its own engine, in order to speed up development and spur on further innovation within the Chromium project. As Chrome has developed over the past few years, design decisions have resulted in the project using quite different multi-process architectures compared with other WebKit-based browsers.

Co-operation is great but this also leads to problems if the contributors have different end-goals, and Chrome has simply grown apart from its WebKit cousins. Other sites Chromium Blog. Google Chrome Extensions. Except as otherwise noted , the content of this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2. NOTE: The information on this page is out of date. This page mostly contains information from Since then, Chrome has switched its rendering engine to Blink a fork of WebKit.

Introduction This document provides a concise list of common compatibility issues with Google Chrome along with their solutions.

It's aimed at Web developers trying to fix compatibility issues with Google Chrome or interested in a list of things to avoid when authoring Websites to use in Google Chrome.

The problem By far the most common problem we see is JavaScript or server-side code that tries to detect the browser by looking at the navigator. Recommendations: Do everything you can to avoid this, parsing navigator. Object detection is a much safer method to achieve per-browser behavior Recommendations: Whenever possible, make use of dynamically sized elements rather than specifying fixed pixel widths.

The problem: If character encoding is not specified precisely, different browsers can interpret the encoding in different ways or not at all. More information on this subject can be found here. We recommend using UTF-8 for all Web content.

If you have to use legacy encoding for some reason, make sure to identify the encoding correctly as outlined above. This has already tempted Opera to adopt Blink. Now, I'm all for simplification, and getting rid of 4. And, as noted by Barth, having multiple rendering engines will no doubt lead to more innovation. The fact that Google focused on simplifying the WebKit is telling.

Sure, Google is interested in adding new features , but in such a multi-platform world, the idea of filling Blink with features that are incompatible with other rendering engines is almost unimaginable. The reason Google wants Blink is down to one thing — the post-PC era. WebKit is long in the tooth, and is a product of PC thinking.

Google wants to change that. There's no doubt that Apple has effectively managed the project and transformed it into a capable post-PC era rendering engine, but it is clear that if Google can eliminate 4.