Google Introduces More Powerful Rendering Engine, Faster Chrome
Google has recently introduced Blink, a more powerful rendering engine for the Chromium project. Google also rolled out Chrome 27 to the Beta channel, touting the fact that the browser loads pages 5% faster (on average).
The good thing about the WebKit rendering engine is that it is lightweight yet powerful, that it is flexible, and that it features a thoughtful design. All these elements got Google to choose the WebKit rendering engine for the Chromium project, the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code.
The downside is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. Having to support multiple architectures lead to increasing complexity for the WebKit and Chromium projects – and that in turn has slowed down the collective pace of innovation.
It is for that reason that Google decided to switch to a new, WebKit-based, open-source rendering engine, mainly Blink.
“This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem,” explained Adam Barth, Software Engineer.
Moving on, Google recently announced that Chrome 27 graduated to the Beta Channel. The exciting thing about this Chrome release is that it loads pages 5% faster (on average).
“Web content now appears on screen 5% faster (on average) thanks to changes in Chrome’s resource scheduler. Starting with this release, the scheduler is more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets. We’ve also added Speed Index values from webpagetest.org to the list of metrics we use to measure improvements in page load time,” explained Kinuko Yasuda, Software Engineer.
Chrome 27 Beta – New Features
The good thing about the WebKit rendering engine is that it is lightweight yet powerful, that it is flexible, and that it features a thoughtful design. All these elements got Google to choose the WebKit rendering engine for the Chromium project, the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code.
The downside is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. Having to support multiple architectures lead to increasing complexity for the WebKit and Chromium projects – and that in turn has slowed down the collective pace of innovation.
It is for that reason that Google decided to switch to a new, WebKit-based, open-source rendering engine, mainly Blink.
“This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem,” explained Adam Barth, Software Engineer.
Moving on, Google recently announced that Chrome 27 graduated to the Beta Channel. The exciting thing about this Chrome release is that it loads pages 5% faster (on average).
“Web content now appears on screen 5% faster (on average) thanks to changes in Chrome’s resource scheduler. Starting with this release, the scheduler is more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets. We’ve also added Speed Index values from webpagetest.org to the list of metrics we use to measure improvements in page load time,” explained Kinuko Yasuda, Software Engineer.
Chrome 27 Beta – New Features
- Faster page loads
- Elegant HTML5 date and time <input> forms
- Live audio input to Web Audio API
- Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Apps
- DevTools updates
- And lots of other features for developers.
