Bruce Lawson's personal site

Blink

As you probably know, Google announced Blink, the new rendering engine that will power Opera and Chrome, forked from WebKit (which itself was forked from KHTML).

• Hello Blink -my take
• Devs respond to new Blink and Servo browser engines – .net magazine
• Excellent analysis by PPK
• Thoughts on Blink – “WebKit wasn’t a love fest of like-minded engineers but 2 lions circling each other, always prepared for the battle” by Krzysztof Kowalczyk, an early contributor to WebKit
• Well, err, that solves the WebKit monoculture problem by Google’s Jake Archibald
• Why What You’re Reading About Blink Is Probably Wrong by Google’s Alex Russell
• 30 minute Q&A video with Paul Irish and Blink devs
• A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ – “we will be silently overwriting all existing installations of Chrome with our new rendering engine without your knowledge or consent”. Auto-updates, eh? That’s NORTH KOREA.

Stand Hards

• asm.js is a cool initiative from Mozilla. It’s a subset of JavaScript that will behave identically whether it is run in an existing JavaScript engine or an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiling engine
• Nintendo Web Framework “is a development environment based on WebKit technologies, supporting application development on the Wii U system using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.”
• Responsive Retrofitting – “finding a way to use responsive techniques on legacy sites to create a better experience for more users”

Industry

• Introducing Tabula – “Upload a PDF, get back tabular CSV data.” Another cool Mozilla initiative.
• Forty mobile phone facts – “every fifth person you meet has two phones and is probably a crystal meth dealer/having an affair.” Or is a developer.

Tumblr Misc

• Punk rock videos – my own occasional curation of live punk
• reasons my son is crying
• Pictures by my daughter
• Indifferent cats in amateur porn – Not Safe for Work (obviously)

And RIP Cynthia Waddell, a tireless lawyer and campaigner for disability rights on the web, and co-author of the first book I helped develop.

It’s great to be able to talk publicly about Blink, the new engine that will power Opera’s browsers (disclosure: my employer, but this is a personal post) and Chrome henceforth. I know a lot of people worried that there would be less diversity on the Web once Opera Presto was retired, and the forking of WebKit into Blink restores that balance. Opera will be contributing to Blink in future.

[added 22:46 UK time] My boss, Lars Erik Bolstad, said on Opera’s behalf: “Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”

My personal feeling (not representing my employer, wife, children or hamster) is that Blink has a lot of promise for the Web. Its architecture allows for greater speed – something that Opera and Google have long focused on. When browsers are fast and interoperable, using the web as a platform becomes more competitive against native app development. I also hope that it’s easier for smaller players and even individuals to contribute to the new rendering engine, with a more transparent gatekeeping process: “Our goal is for anyone to be able to participate, regardless of organizational affiliation.”

It’s also great that there will be no more vendor prefixes in Blink (only legacy ones inherited from WebKit that will be removed or dropped where possible). Vendor prefixes were like Morrissey’s solo career: on paper, a good idea – but in reality, a horrible mess.

So, hello Blink. With Presto remaining in the wild until 2020, and Firefox’s co-incidental announcement today that it’s collaborating with Samsung on two early stage projects to build a new rendering engine called Servo, diversity on the Web has never looked healthier, and interoperability never (er) interoperabler.