Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally. The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much closer to a webkit monoculture.
Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and you're prevented from telling them to use another browser).
It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
> It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well.
Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).
They did not managed to kill anything, there are plenty of markets where iOS is not a presence we care about and keep doing mobile Web applications, business as usual.
I think it depends if a lot of pages start breaking. Right now it's not happening at scale, but I don't see them having any reason not to refork Blink if more "only tested on Chrome" sites start breaking on Safari.
I'd expect them to maintain all strategic decisions if they did refork, including disabling PWA features; there's nothing that says they have to enable PWAs just because they fork from Blink.
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