Comment by cosmic_cheese

WebKit never took off on Windows, true, but saying that it was a failure is a stretch. It’s served Mac and iOS devs well in the past 22 years, both as a full-featured embeddable multiprocess webview and as the core of alternative browsers (OmniWeb in the past, Orion today).

The reason I believe that moving functionality out of the engine into the browser serves as a moat is because it gives Google more power to exert its will on Chromium forks.

If Blink were fully independent, third parties wouldn’t be beholden to forking Chrome; they could just drop Blink into their bespoke UI. Google’s decisions in Chrome would be entirely irrelevant to these third party devs. As things are now, forking Chrome is for practical purposes required if you want to use Blink, and diverging from mainline presents a risk — the more divergent forks become, the more effort and developers it takes to keep up with patches. Few organizations have the kind of manpower required to move at the Chrome team's pace while also maintaining their own large sets of patches.

This means that every decision in Chrome that forks disagree with adds more maintanence overhead, limiting the bulk of changes to those that are skin deep.

Google may not have intended this effect from the outset but it’s certainly realized the leverage it gives them in the time since.