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Comment by holtalanm | Hacker News Reader

well, if you look at it now, webkit is BY FAR not the dominant engine.

So, by your own logic, if Microsoft ends up in a disagreement with Google about the direction of chromium, whats to stop them from just forking it and becoming the new dominant engine?

Chrome will only remain the dominant web browser as long as its users view it as worth the hassle. If Edge is built upon chromium in the future, I'm not going to sit here and say that Chrome will remain the dominant browser following that.

We can sit here and talk about 'what ifs' all day.

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No, by my own logic Microsoft cannot win in case of a fork, because Microsoft is superficial in pumping resources into browsers, as history is showing us ever since IExplorer 6.

Them switching to Chromium is essentially admitting defeat and inability in building a modern browser.

WebKit is the dominant engine because it's what powers Webviews on Android.

> Since Android 4.4 (KitKat), the WebView component is based on the Chromium open source project. (...) Webviews also share the same rendering engine as Chrome for Android. [0]

KitKat was released in 2013[1] as well as Blink in the same year[2].

Apart from Blink being a WebKit fork, WebKit itself is not "the dominant engine" anymore at least since 2014.

[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/webview/overview

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

Not since android.. 6? It defaults to the chrome browser. You can choose the other chrome browsers too (beta dev canary if installed, via the developer settings) and the web view might actually also be chrome. WebKit on android is from ages ago.

Im not talking about default web browsers.

I wasn't either!

https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/webview/overview Since 4.4 it is based on Chrome, not WebKit. Since I think version 6, on all the Google phones it defaults to using Chrome for WebView instead of the "WebView for Android" browser.

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