RenderingEngine
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Google's Blink engine (gently) hints at a more streamlined future for Chrome
Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. 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. This doesn't necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won't be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won't actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won't prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork -- the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works. Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it's expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it's already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit's baggage.
WebKit turns 10, celebrates a decade of speedy, standards-compliant browsing
It's hard to believe but WebKit, the rendering engine inside Safari and Chrome, is now ten years old. The forked child of KDE's KHTML received its first commit of code from Apple back on August 24th of 2001. It would be well over a year before the debut of Safari in 2003, and another two years before it was fully open sourced. Since then it's begun to replace Gecko (Mozilla) as the rendering engine du jour and even spawned a sequel in Webkit2. So, happy birthday to Apple's greatest contribution to the open source community.
Crazy, beautiful human being designs 3D raycaster engine for Arduino
Look, not everybody gets to be super smart. Some of us have to struggle along with our mediocre intellects and just bask in the glory of genius. Like this time: we ran into Adam Wolf at Maker Faire in New York, and while many burgeoning hackers were using their Arduino to flip LEDs on and off in vaguely interesting ways, Adam was showing off a 3D raycaster engine. It's like witnessing some sort of alternate history where Wolfenstein 3D came out for Atari first. Just to give you an idea of the technical challenge: half of the Arduino's memory is used up by the frame buffer alone! The game is controlled and displayed using the Video Game Shield Arduino add-on from Wayne and Layne (Adam is Wayne), which enables RCA video output and compatibility with Wii nunchucks for dual analog control. Adam actually plans to add enemies and make a full game out of his engine, just to rub it in. Need some visual proof to believe all this? Check out a video after the break. The Video Game Shield will be up for purchase on September 29 for around $22, or you can buy it at the Maker Faire this weekend. %Gallery-103290%
Apple announces WebKit2 with Chrome-like process splitting
Apple's big announcement of the day might have been iPhone OS 4, but another reveal that's gone slightly under the radar might actually turn out to be a bigger deal: WebKit2, which now runs browser elements as separate processes, much like Google Chrome. Actually, Apple's devs say it goes a little farther than Chrome, since the process model is built into the foundation so other non-Safari clients can use it. That's pretty wild stuff, considering how prevalent WebKit has become across the mobile space and the fact that Chrome itself uses the rendering engine. No word on when this will all go final, but hey -- it's all open source, and you can actually grab Mac and Windows binaries right now. Let us know how it goes, won't you?
Kensington laptop dock first to feature startup's multiple-monitors-over-USB tech
Although we're pretty sure that many of you wouldn't agree with Newnham Research CEO Michael Ledzion's assertion that "connecting a graphics card to a PC is hard, and expensive," you might still be interested in his company's technology for connecting multiple displays to a PC through a standard USB connection, which will debut in a Kensington laptop dock in June. The Cambridge, England-based startup is able to achieve this rather amazing feat through a hardware rendering engine call NIVO, which can either be built directly into a monitor or incorporated into other peripherals, and which uses proprietary compression algorithms to deliver video up to 1280 x 1024 at 75Hz. As you could probably guess, this technology isn't designed for gaming -- the company suggests using it to display "largely static images" -- although it's supposedly capable of HD playback, which is something we'd definitely like to see firsthand.[Via Extreme Tech]
