Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers.
WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).
That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.
One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).
WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).
That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.
One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.