It’s been a few days now since Google announced their decision to start their own fork of WebKit, called Blink. I was initially quite surprised and disappointed by this, given the duplication of effort and fragmentation this could possibly lead to. I understood the situation much better however after reading Alex Russell’s post which explains their rationale, and I feel that all the reasons he gave make sense — that is, Google has more freedom to innovate by working separately from Apple.

There’s an even more important reason though that I think this is actually a good thing — diversity. People forget the dire state the web was in back in 1999, when Netscape was on its deathbed and Internet Explorer was emerging as the winner of the “browser wars”. Developers started targeting IE only, and those using anything else were left in the cold. People who argued against this were considered by the mainstream to be on the fringes of society, and ridiculed for not simply giving in and accepting the inevitable victory of the almighty IE6. My, how times have changed.

The KHTML library (which became WebKit) was initially created around this period by Lars Knoll and other developers involved with the KDE project, with the goal of producing a modern, high-quality browser for the Linux desktop. While KDE never saw the success it deserved, WebKit went on to become one of the biggest success stories of the open source movement, after being adopted & improved first by Apple (for Safari), and then by Google (for Chrome). What started out in its first few years as an underdog has now become the market leader on mobile by an overwhelming majority.

We’re now in the ironic situation where instead of the web being at risk of becoming an IE monoculture, it is now at risk of becoming a WebKit monoculture. Both of these things are bad; it’s important that web sites continue to be developed based on standards, not on the quirks of a particular browser engine. Multiple implementations are key to this — it ensures, in the long term, that all browsers converge towards consistent behaviour, and keeps the possibility open of entirely new browser engines being created in the future.

Although Blink and WebKit are identical right now, the fact that Google is going to follow a separate development path will help ensure that as the web evolves, we’ll have an additional implementation of all new APIs and layout features. There’ll undoubtedly be fragmentation problems with new features added to standards in the short term, but it will result an a better outcome in the long term as bugs are fixed to comply with the standards, and developers are forced to create sites that work in any browser, not just those based on WebKit.