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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone converging on using webkit to render everything. Feels like slowly stepping backwards into the days when everyone writes for webkit rather than a more open internet.

WebKit and Blink are separate engines.

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Yes, but the latter is a fork of the former's core components.

doesn't matter that it's a fork if behaviour / features diverge like they do

It was forked over 10 years ago now. I doubt their shared past is even recognizable now.

There were substantial differences even from day one. As I recall one of the differences of opinion that was a driving cause of the fork was the multiprocess model; WebKit team wanted that to be part of the framework, letting any WebKit-embedding app get it for “free”, whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

> with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

Isn't that what happened anyway? The non-Chromium dists of Blink like Electron and WebView2 both employ the same multi-process approach as Chrome.exe (and my RAM availability is suffering for it...)

Electron bundles Chromium, not Blink directly. Believe this is true of WebView2 too but am not well-versed in Windows internals.

In fact I’m not aware of any major non-Chromium usages of Blink, except maybe in Qt (where it replaced WebKit a few years ago) but I’m not sure about that either.

Nah, QtWebEngine is using Chromium, not Blink directly

> whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

Is that why Electron basically means Chromium?

And WebKit is a fork of KHTML, so...

...sort of...

They diverged from a common starting point, but they did diverge, pulled apart by wildly different priorities, contributors, and usecases.

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