Google announced in its blog the Blink engine, which will be used in the Chromium browser and the Chrome OS operating system instead of the WebKit engine.

Blink, an open source engine, is based on WebKit and is a fork of it. Blink is currently in its early stages of development. Google primarily intends to refine the “internal architecture” of the engine and simplify the code base: more than 7 thousand files or 4.5 million lines of code have been removed from the project.

Since there are no plans to make radical changes to Blink anytime soon, Google says developers will experience little difference between the new engine and WebKit.

Google noted that the decision to abandon WebKit in favor of Blink was "not an easy one." The company said the reasons for switching to the new engine include the browser's "multi-process" architecture and the need to support multiple versions of Chromium for different platforms.

“We believe,” Google said in a blog post, “that engine diversity, like browser diversity, drives technological progress and, over time, improves the health of the entire open web ecosystem.”

Chromium will not be the only browser project based on Blink. Representatives of Opera Software in an interview with The Next Web stated that they will use the engine in the Opera browser for mobile devices and computers. In February 2013, Opera abandoned the Presto engine in favor of WebKit.

The Chromium browser has been using the WebKit engine since its release in 2008. The same engine is used in the Safari browser, which is developed by Apple. Internet Explorer is based on Trident, and Firefox uses Gecko - however, browser developer Mozilla announced on April 3 that it would release a “next-generation” Servo engine together with Samsung.

Chrome browser will change engine