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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing.

I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.

Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".

In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.

If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.

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This makes no sense because it ignores the reality that unlike KHTML, or WebKit, the vast majority of browsers were not based on those rendering engines. There was never a time where a web app developer saw your browser was not Webkit or KHTML based and told you to upgrade to them on every platform. There was never a time where KHTML or Webkit completely dominated browser share.

There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).

So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.

I guess the question I'd ask here is: why does it matter that Chromium has massive market share?

The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.

Maybe there's another reason I've missed, though!

There are forks, and there are forks. If you take a codebase like Blink, fork it, and commit to maintaining that fork entirely by yourself independent of the upstream then yeah, what the upstream does at that point is kinda irrelevant. If, however, you're still relying on upstream for important patches and you're just rebasing your small changeset on top of that every so often, then there are limits to how far you can diverge from upstream before pulling in those necessary changes becomes impractical.

If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".

Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.

Who is "gp"?

gp = Grandparent, the parent comment's parent. The grandparent of my comment here would be jasode's comment that you replied to.

I see, thank you! I've never seen comments referred to like that before but it makes a lot of sense.

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