In a move that's long been expected in Web developer circles, Google finally forked the open-source Webkit Web browser engine.

The true ramifications aren't entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories.

Google is taking its ball and going home, forking the open-source WebKit browser rendering engine that Chrome and Safari currently use and that Opera recently said it would start using.

As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome's Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million lines of code from the original WebKit repository.

So why is Google going to all the effort of forking the WebKit rendering engine in order to create Blink? It's down to one thing — the post-PC era that we find ourselves in.

A new experimental effort in Chrome aims to run the proper Blink engine on iOS instead of Apple's required WebKit engine.

Google has announced that it’s moving from the WebKit rendering engine to its own, named Blink, for Chromium (and thus all Google products based on WebKit).What is Blink?Blink is a rendering ...

Google is testing Chrome's Blink web engine on iOS, but don't expect it in a public browser for now.

Google has announced that it is forking the WebKit browser architecture developed by Apple to create its own Blink rendering engine for Chrome.

Despite the external similarities between Blink and WebKit, Google's excising of 4.5 million lines of code should lead to "more stability and fewer bugs," says Chrome software engineer Adam Barth.