The entire point of this subthread is that it doesn't matter that you can take Webkit and do whatever you want, because the web is a client/server (browser/site) protocol, and having the ability to fork the client is irrelevant when this makes you incompatible with every server. Technical capital isn't sufficient; it takes social capital to pull off a hard fork.

> So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial.

I've been on HN long enough to remember this tired argument from back before the Blink fork. The gain in efficiency from having a unilateral dictator is not worth the loss of mutual counterbalancing oversight. It is completely without foundation to give Google the benefit of the doubt that they will be well-behaved when there are no consequences for misbehavior. Google is not your friend, nor is Google's mission to make the web better. Google is a corporation whose purpose is to maximize profit by selling advertisements. You might as well hand stewardship of the web over to Comcast.

Not sure if that should have been Blink, or if you're making a subtle point about how Blink was forked from WebKit (which was in turn forked from KHTML).

Personally, while I can see why some may react to this news with concern about a monoculture, I find it hard to feel sorry about the end of the last significant closed source browser engine.

If Microsoft gives up IE and Edge then all the major browsers will have an open source foundation. With Gecko, WebKit, and Blink there remains a healthy range of options, too.

And as the history of KHTML/WebKit/Blink demonstrates, derivatives will appear if there's enough interest. Perhaps someday Microsoft will follow the examples Apple and Google have set by creating their own fork, if the circumstances warrant it.