Chrome Starts To Take Off In Mobile Browser Share, But Android Dips Among Mobile Operating Systems
Among mobile browsers, Safari continues to lead the pack by a wide margin according to this month’s data from NetMarketShare, but the real movement is happening within the Android segment, with Chrome growing fast as the stock Android browser lags behind. Android overall dipped slightly in May in terms of mobile OS share, hitting an eight month low according to NetMarketShare’s tracking.
Android’s stock browser lost over 2 percentage points of share between April and May, and Chrome mobile gained just under a full percentage point. Google has been pushing the mobile version of Chrome, shipping it on devices with Android pre-installed since last fall. That has resulted in a steady upwards movement of share, growing from 0.34 percent last July to 3.22 percent this past May. Stock Android browser share is actually flat over that eleven month period, however, indicating that Chrome’s share is all coming in new device sales, and not as a result of people switching from one to the other on their own devices.
According to OS share, Android is down slightly from last month, and inf fact hits a low point compared to many previous measuring periods. Apple’s iOS is up slightly from last month, but mostly flat, and Symbian, Java ME and BlackBerry actually all experienced small bumps, meaning Android’s nearly 2 percentage point fall didn’t result in a big win for pretty much any platform. Still, it’s interesting to see those numbers dip during a month when Android saw the launch of two big new flagship phones in the Galaxy S4 and HTC One.
Overall, though, the most interesting story here is Chrome’s mobile growth. Google is making a big push for cross-platform compatibility and portability, and a lot of what it’s showing off on the Chrome side of things is designed to bring mobile and desktop together. To achieve that goal, it becomes instrumental that mobile Chrome achieve greater uptake, which is an uphill battle considering that it only arrived last year. Still, it seems to be gaining momentum, which is good for Google’s long-term goals.
Source: TechCrunch
Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome And Chrome OS
Google just announced that it is forking WebKitand launching this fork as Blink. As Googledescribes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.
THE “COLLABORATION HAS BEEN FANTASTIC”
As Google’s VP of Engineering Linus Upson and Alex Komoroske, Google Product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me yesterday, the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem. Komoroske noted that when it comes to working with the other companies involved in the WebKit project, the “collaboration has been fantastic.”
This decision clearly wasn’t made lightly. Indeed, as Upson stressed when I talked to him yesterday, “management asked a lot of hard questions” about this move, but in the end, the decision was made in order to reduce the technical complexity of evolving Google’s rendering engine in the direction the team wanted to go in.
BLINK: SPEED AND SIMPLICITY
Specifically, Komoroske noted, Chromium’s multi-process architecture is very different from the rest of WebKit (Chromium is the open-source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS). Having to integrate Google’s way of doing things with WebKit and what the rest of the WebKit partners were doing was “slowing everybody down,” Komoroske said.
As an open-source project, both Chromium and Blink are open to outside committers, though as is typical for these kinds of projects, they’ll have to be nominated to become project members.
For now, WebKit and Blink pretty much look the same, but Google expects that they will evolve in very different directions over time. Komoroske, for example, would like to run iframes in different processes, but that’s something that’s very difficult to do with WebKit right now.
For now, though, developers won’t notice too much of a difference as most of the work will focus on internal architectural improvements. Google says, for example, that it will be able to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Over time, Google says, this will results in a “healthier codebase” and lead “to more stability and fewer bugs.”
The WebKit project was started by Apple after it forked the KDE project’s open-source KHTML engine for its Safari browser. In an unusual move – and after a lot of back and forth between the KHTML team and Apple – Apple announced in 2005 that it would open source WebKit, and Google then adapted it for its Chrome browser. Interestingly, Google actually used a forked version of WebKit in the early days of Chromium but later reconciled its fork with the rest of the project.
In this context, it’s worth remembering that all of the different vendors who currenly build WebKit-based browsers already implement it very differently (and often use their own JavaScript engine, too).
Read the full article: TechCrunch