Blink was the rendering engine forked from WebKit by Google. Google announced Blink on April 3, 2013, after Chrome’s developers had increasingly diverged from Apple’s WebKit codebase.
Google had originally selected WebKit for Chrome, but Chrome’s multi-process architecture required substantial custom changes. Maintaining those changes upstream became increasingly difficult, so Google created Blink as an independent engine within the open-source Chromium project. The fork also allowed Google to remove WebKit components that Chrome did not use.
Blink first powered Chromium-based browsers and later became the engine behind browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi. A frequent mix-up is treating Blink as a JavaScript engine: Blink handles page rendering and layout, while Chrome’s V8 handles JavaScript execution. Blink’s own name references both speed and the old, non-standard HTML blink element associated with Netscape-era web pages.