Written in C++ Type Layout engine | Operating system | |
Developer(s) The Chromium Project with contributions from Google, Opera Software, Adobe Systems, Intel, Samsung and others Initial release April 3, 2013; 3 years ago (2013-04-03) License Three-clause BSD and GNU LGPL v2.1 | ||
Blink is a web browser engine developed as part of the Chromium project by The Chromium Project with contributions from Google, Opera Software ASA, Adobe Systems,Intel, Samsung and others. It was first announced in April 2013.
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Engine
Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit and is used in Chrome starting at version 28, Opera (15+), Amazon Silk and other Chromium-based browsers and frameworks.
Much of WebCore's code is used for features which Chrome implements differently (such as sandboxing and the multi-process model). These parts were altered for the Blink fork, and although made slightly bulkier, it allowed greater flexibility for adding new features in the future. The fork will also deprecate vendor prefixes; experimental functionality will instead be enabled on an opt-in basis. Aside from these planned changes, Blink currently remains relatively similar to WebCore. By commit count, Google has been the largest contributor to the WebKit code base since late 2009.
Blink's naming was influenced by the non-standard presentational blink HTML tag, which was introduced by Netscape Navigator, and supported by Presto and Gecko-based browsers until August 2013.
Frameworks
Several projects exist to turn Chromium’s Blink into a reusable software framework for other developers: