What makes browser engines different? Image: FirefoxĮvery part of a page’s rendering and the way user interactions are handled is carried out by the browser engine, and while each of the engines do a lot of processing in the same way, there are some differences too. For that to happen, you need support from a browser engine, if you don’t get it, and a lot of other engineers agree with you, you might consider creating your own browser engine, which is basically how we’ve got where we are today (although the chances of a new engine ever getting off the ground in the future are slim, as Microsoft has proved).īrowser engines are the main reason that webpages sometimes look, load, and work differently in different browsers – it’s more likely the variations between Quantum, WebKit, and Blink than the variations between Firefox, Safari, and Chrome that are behind these differences.Īs the web evolves though, the variations are becoming less about the surface visuals (which are pretty much the same across the board) and more about the underlying technologies. Say you want to introduce a new and improved way for web developers to show videos embedded inside text on a webpage. So far so good… so why do we need different ones? Well, different programmers have different ideas about how best to do the job of a browser engine – displaying colours, optimising code, refreshing pages, and so on.Ĭase in point: Google launched Blink as a separate engine back in 2013 to improve on what it saw as failings in WebKit’s handling of multiple processes. Everything else – menus, extensions, smart searching, autofill – is pretty redundant if you can’t actually see the sites you’re visiting properly. In fact, you can consider the browser engine to be the most important part of the browser, much like a car engine is the most important part of your car. If you’re looking for a new web browser or a Chrome alternative, you might want to check out our article on that.
#WEBKIT VS BLINK FULL#
It’s like a step between Blink and the full Google Chrome (or the new Microsoft Edge): A bare bones, open source browser, which others can build on top of. We’re not covering it in detail here, but don’t get confused by Chromium. There are three main engines to consider: WebKit (powering Safari), Quantum (powering Firefox), and Blink (powering Chrome, Opera, Brave, and others).
#WEBKIT VS BLINK CODE#
The browser engine, rendering engine, and JavaScript engine are all essentially working together to get raw web code into a viewable and usable form inside your browser. Technically, the rendering engine renders pages and the browser engine handles comms between the rendering engine and the browser user interface.Īs we’ve said, not everyone always makes the distinction, and there’s also a Javascript engine in each case to help process website code, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll follow Wikipedia’s lead and just use “browser engine” as an all-encompassing term here. When you choose a web browser, you’re also choosing a browser engine and a rendering engine – sometimes these two terms are used separately and sometimes to mean the same thing.
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