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Chrome will officially leave WebKit for Blink in 10 weeks

Chrome will officially leave WebKit for Blink in 10 weeks

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Google has given the first indication as to when it will release its first Blink-enabled builds of its Chrome browser, confirming that it will enable its new rendering engine in Chrome 28. Answering questions submitted by the Chrome developer community in a Q&A video panel, Chrome developer advocate Paul Irish explained that while Blink is already integrated in Chrome Canary builds, we can expect to see it in stable versions of the browser "in around 10 weeks."

Earlier this week, Google formally announced it was forking WebKit to create its own rendering engine, called Blink. The company spelled out the difficulties in supporting its multi-process architecture in Webkit, which it said "slowed down the collective pace of innovation," and sought to adapt the browser engine to "improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem." Because Blink is an open-source fork of Webkit, web developers won't need to do too much to support Blink and Chrome.

Expect a stable release within 10 weeks, a beta release even sooner

The latest version of Chrome is version 26, which brought password sync and autofill entries to Android. Google says that it hopes to release stable versions of its Chrome 28 for Android and the desktop within 10 weeks, but it is possible that we could see Blink incorporated into beta releases before then.