The Origins of the Blink Tag

sanimal · on May 26, 2014

Do browsers not render the blink tag anymore? I just tested it on Chrome and Firefox and it looks like it has been laid to rest.

e15ctr0n · on May 26, 2014

Support for the <blink> tag was dropped in Firefox 23 in August 2013[0][1]. In February 2013, Opera had announced that it would switch from its Presto rendering engine (which supported <blink>) to WebKit (which never did). Since Internet Explorer's Trident rendering engine never supported <blink> either, this would leave Firefox's Gecko as the only rendering engine to support it. In April 2013, Chrome forked WebKit to create its own rendering engine called Blink[3] (named, ironically, because it doesn't support the <blink> tag.)

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=857820

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/23.0/releasenotes

[2] http://dev.opera.com/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webk...

[3] http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-...

This was the HN discussion when <blink> support was dropped from Gecko:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170392

jeroen · on May 26, 2014

Firefox 22 was the last version to support it. The other big browsers have ended support as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bl...

ethana · on May 26, 2014

What's stopping ya?! http://jsbin.com/xizagasi/1

krapp · on May 26, 2014

<blink>Fascists!</blink>

stonogo · on May 26, 2014

I enjoy the irony of this site's users taking time out from showing each other javascript pdf renderers, javascript x86 emulators, and css animations to hate on <blink>. I enjoy it very much.

SAI_Peregrinus · on May 25, 2014

This does not need an article. "It leaked out of Satan's pustules." is plenty.

kabdib · on May 26, 2014

Today I learned . . . that God himself burned down the building that the blink tag was invented in.

Perhaps someone in Mountain View could stop by and salt the earth, just to be sure?

(Huh, looks like there are some business buildings there now. I can imagine next Tuesday morning: "Hey, what are all these boxes of salt doing in the parking lot?")