After Chromium forking WebKit as Blink, here it comes another fork of WebKit layout engine – Qt WebEngine
WebKit is the most popular layout engine used by web browsers or embedded web view component such as on Android. Chromium (or Google Chrome), Safari and newer versions of Opera browser, all use WebKit engine or a fork based on it.
The origin of WebKit engine can be traced back to KDE’s KHTML and KJS engine. Apple created WebKit as a closed source fork of KHTML and KJS. Later, Apple finally decided to do something good for the community and open sourced WebKit. Soon after that WebKit development exploded and become one of the most advanced and popular web browser engine.
A few months back, Google decided to create its own fork of WebKit as Blink to benefits the development of Chromium (Google Chrome) as the design of WebKit2 and Chromium’s internal WebKit engine have diverged.
Now, the Qt project is planning to follow Chromium, by re-basing its WebKit component on Chromium’s Blink. And the reasons are explained in the Source blog