Saying that Webkit2 is Safari-only is not very close to the truth: Apart from chromium I can't think of a single actively maintained port that is still webkit1-based, whereas there are multiple webkit2 ports that are very much alive (even if they are having problems collaborating with Apple efficiently).
Posted Apr 4, 2013 21:14 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)
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In fact the timing suggests this is not a coincidence. One possibility is that Google was coordinating this in secret with Opera, so that when the Blink fork was announced it would not be just Google going alone but Google + Opera. Better PR.
Google's "Blink" rendering engine
Posted Apr 5, 2013 8:10 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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You are reading too much into this. Such things don't happen overnight. Decision to create fork most likely brewed for a long time - in fact it was a de-facto situation already (Chromium uses WebKit1 while most other direct WebKit users use WebKit2) - thus when Opera decided to join Chromium world it was probably already more-or-less decided. Which means that Opera was notified about creation of fork in advance but probably had nothing to do with decision itself.