The true ramifications aren't entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories.

Initially it uses the same software code base that all WebKit-based browsers share, but over time it will diverge into a totally separate project, Google announced today.

Google is taking its ball and going home, forking the open-source WebKit browser rendering engine that Chrome and Safari currently use and that Opera recently said it would start using.

As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome's Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million lines of code from the original WebKit repository.

Google has announced that it’s moving from the WebKit rendering engine to its own, named Blink, for Chromium (and thus all Google products based on WebKit).What is Blink?Blink is a rendering ...

So why is Google going to all the effort of forking the WebKit rendering engine in order to create Blink? It's down to one thing — the post-PC era that we find ourselves in.

Google is testing Chrome's Blink web engine on iOS, but don't expect it in a public browser for now.

Programmer Robert O'Callahan says Google's Native Client technology contradicts laudable Web standards principles the Net giant laid out for Blink, its new browser engine project.

Despite the external similarities between Blink and WebKit, Google's excising of 4.5 million lines of code should lead to "more stability and fewer bugs," says Chrome software engineer Adam Barth.

Google has announced that it is forking the WebKit browser architecture developed by Apple to create its own Blink rendering engine for Chrome.