April of 2013, Google announced that its Chrome browser would move away from the then WebKit engine to a new, Google-backed (but still open-source) engine called Blink. Reasons included a desire to improve performance and reduce complexity.
The team’s goals focus is on mobile device performance, “in part because Web engines (e.g. Blink) are not nearly as good on performance-constrained devices as they need to be.” Google considers smooth scrolling and animation, input responsiveness, and load time to be key factors on mobile devices. In addition, the company wants to improve on these while reducing memory usage and power consumption.
Other goals include “improving the mobile Web platform itself,” blurring the line between locally installed applications and apps run in the browser window. Google wants to enable “better-than-AppCache” offline modes for apps, Web apps that support push notifications, and apps that support hardware-specific features like screen orientation.
Google also moved away from WebKit so that it could deprecate code it wasn’t using, and that kind of cleanup will continue in 2014. Google wants to remove unspecified “large platform features,” but with “minimal breakage.” For the rest of the codebase, the team wants to “modularize and homogenize” it, making it easier to make changes to specific features without breaking other things. Finally, developers will be getting tools that will help them analyze “mobile design [and] performance” and some new mobile app guidelines from Google. The team wants to reduce the amount of time it takes for developers to begin using a feature once that feature ships.
What sorts of things can you expect from Chrome?
- Deliver a speedier DOM and JS engine
- Keep the platform secure
Chrome and Blink and All major browser engines now share the exact same parsing logic, which means things like broken markup, <a> tags wrapping block elements, and other edge cases are all handled consistently across browsers. This interoperability is important to Chrome and they want to defend it in the next 12 months?
Short Term & long term Goal
Their main short-term aim is to improve performance, compatibility and stability for all the platforms where Chrome is shipped. In the long term they hope to significantly improve Chrome and inspire innovation among all the browser manufacturers. In addition, will be increasing their investment in conformance tests (shared with W3C working groups) as part of our commitment to being good citizens of the open web.
Ongoing Information & Trends: A Weblog 
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