Blink? Well, it’s a new rendering engine for Chromium with a big mission statement: “To improve the open web through technical innovation and good citizenship” 

Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine?

There are two main reasons:

• The main reason is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. So, over the years, supporting multiple architectures has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium communities, slowing down the collective pace of innovation.

• In addition, this gives an opportunity to do open-ended investigations into other performance improvement strategies. We want web applications to be as fast as possible. So for example, we want to make as many of the browser’s duties run in parallel (think iframes!), so we can keep the main thread free for your application code. We’ve already made significant progress here, for example by reducing the impact JavaScript and layout has on page scrolling, and making it so an increasing number of CSS animations can run at 60fps even while JavaScript is doing some heavy-lifting.

If you wish to understand better this new story I would recommend you to read Alex Russell excellent post on it: http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/ and for the ones the like (even more) details: The Developer FAQ contain more.

Misc

• Sir Paul Lewis thoughts: http://www.aerotwist.com/blog/hello-blink/
• What is webkit? – A good post from Paul Irish.
• On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242
• The details on Chromium blog: blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-…
• Blink new home: http://www.chromium.org/blink