Blink (browser engine)
free and open-source browser engine of the Chromium project
Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code.
To create Chrome, Google initially chose to use Apple's WebKit engine. However, Google needed to make substantial changes to its code to support Chrome's novel multi-process browser architecture. Over the course of several years, the divergence from Apple's version increased, so Google decided to officially fork its version as Blink in 2013.
Blink's name was influenced by two factors: the implication of speed, and a reference to the non-standard blink HTML element, popularised by Netscape Navigator, but which was never actually implemented within Blink.
By commit count, Google was the largest contributor to the WebKit project from late 2009 until the fork in 2013. One of the first changes of the new fork was to deprecate CSS vendor prefixes, including WebKit's; experimental Blink functionality is instead enabled on an opt-in basis.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9603949. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blink (browser engine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.