When Opera announced in February that it would switch to the WebKit browser engine, the same basic technology that powers Chrome and Safari, critics wondered if this was a bad move for the open Web.

The worry was that browser vendors were putting too much power in the hands of one rendering engine. Many, no doubt, were recalling the years when Internet Explorer dominated browser usage requiring Web developers to cater to IE‘s peculiarities.

Fears of a so-called WebKit monoculture may be over now that the Chromium Project is splitting with WebKit, an open source project created by Apple in 2001. Google will instead work on its own rendering engine called Blink, taking the new engine’s initial codebase from WebKit, a practice called forking. Chromium is the Google-led open-source browser project that supplies the code for the company’s Chrome Web browser.

With the addition of Blink, there are now four major Web engines including WebKit, Mozilla’s Gecko engine powering Firefox, and Microsoft’s Trident for Internet Explorer.

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