The WebKit browser engine is becoming a less flexible foundation for open-source projects with the departure of Google from the project this week and Apple’s consequent paring back of the project.
WebKit is a broad project that includes participation from many interested parties — not just Apple and Google, but also BlackBerry, Samsung, Amazon, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and the programmers involved with the KDE and Gnome user interfaces for Linux. Indeed, the open-source project began as KDE’s KHTML engine for the Konqueror browser before Apple got involved.