Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the Chromium project with contributions from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Opera Software, Adobe, Intel, IBM, Samsung, and others.^[2][3] It was first announced in April 2013.^[4]

Naming

Blink's naming was influenced by the non-standard presentational blink HTML element, which was introduced by Netscape Navigator, and supported by Presto- and Gecko-based browsers until August 2013. Blink has, contrary to its name, never functionally supported the element.^[5][6][7]

History

Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit,^[8] which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.^[9][10] It is used in Chrome starting at version 28,^[11][12] Microsoft Edge starting at version 79,^[13] Opera (15+),^[11] Vivaldi, Brave, Amazon Silk and other Chromium-based browsers and frameworks.^{[citation needed]}

Much of WebCore's code was used for features that Google Chrome implemented differently such as sandboxing and the multi-process model. These parts were altered for the Blink fork, and although slightly bulkier, it allowed greater flexibility for adding new features. The fork also deprecates CSS vendor prefixes; existing prefixes will be phased out and new experimental functionality will instead be enabled on an opt-in basis.^[14] Aside from these planned changes, Blink initially remained relatively similar to WebCore.^[12]

By commit count, Google was the largest contributor to the WebKit code base from late 2009 until 2013 when they started work on their fork, Blink.^[15]

Internals

Blink engine has the following components:^[16]

• DOM, HTML DOM and CSS rendering engines
• Web IDL implementation
• Skia Graphics engine — makes calls to an underlying Graphics Library (like OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX etc) which depends on the platform
• V8 JavaScript engine

Frameworks

Several projects exist to turn Chromium's Blink into a reusable software framework for other developers:

• In currently supported versions of the Android operating system (since version 4.4) the WebView component is based on Blink instead of WebKit.^[17]
• Chromium Embedded Framework is widely used in software by Adobe Systems,^[18][19][20] streaming media services such as Spotify,^[21] video game services such as Battle.net and Steam,^[22] etc.^[23]
• NW.js (previously known as Node-Webkit) is the original Node.js based framework and is being developed by Intel.
• Electron is a Node.js based framework developed by GitHub.
• In the Qt 5 framework the Qt WebEngine module supersedes the previous QtWebKit module.^[23][24] In 2013, Qt WebEngine replaced the Apple-developed WebKit engine with Blink because of its cross-platform features (like WebRTC, WebGL, WebSockets, system calls etc) that work out of the box.^[25][26] Qt developers found it easier to maintain and test it.^[25]
• Microsoft Edge WebView2 is a framework that allows developers of Windows apps to implement a desktop app using web technologies, replacing the older WebView EdgeHTML based or WebBrowser MSHTML based controls.
• DotNetBrowser is a proprietary .NET Chromium-based library that can be used to use Chromium capabilities in a wide range of .NET applications, including desktop and server solutions.^{[27][better source needed]}

Platforms

Chromium Blink is implemented on seven platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, Fuchsia, Android, and Android WebView.

Blink is also unofficially supported on FreeBSD^[28] and OpenBSD.^[29]

iOS versions of Chromium continue to use the WebKit WebCore renderer.^[30]