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.
Google's "Blink" rendering engine
Posted Apr 8, 2013 18:16 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)
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The Opera move was a cost cutting move. Opera used the "based on Chromium" announcement to cover up the layoffs of their in house staff that was maintaining their own internal rendering engine.
As I understand it almost 100 people (93 was the number I saw) got the axe with Opera's move to Chromium.
