Adobe’s director of engineering for the Web Platform, Vincent Hardy, has confirmed that the company is not taking sides in the WebKit/Blink web rendering engine fork and will be contributing to both WebKit and Blink as they are open source. In a blog posting, Hardy pointed out that “Adobe actively contribute to Web standards and browser implementations” – mostly WebKit and Chromium, but the company also has some Gecko contributions to its name.
Hardy references Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, who wrote “The web needs multiple implementations of its evolving standards to keep them interoperable”. Hardy notes that “making sure that WebKit, Blink and other browser engines interoperate is more important than it has ever been” and that part of this is ensuring that interoperability can be achieved by contributing code to open source browsers.
Among the reasons for the contributions is that Adobe’s Edge Tools have been using the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) as their rendering platform for a year and so it is in Adobe’s interest to contribute to Blink as that will now be at the core of CEF. Adobe also wants to ensure that new features for the web are available in open browsers; this has been the main reason for its collaboration with Mozilla and is now why it will also contribute to WebKit, as well as Blink.
Hardy says that Blink’s policy for not having prefixes for web features and requiring new experimental features to be enabled in the browser is good for the web as it will allow draft standard features to be kept out of production web sites and cut down browser compatibility headaches in the future.
via The-H