I have no idea if it's a good or bad thing. Having single engine for a web developer is a good thing. Having no competition is a bad thing. Having engine controlled by a greedy ad-driven corporation is a bad thing. Blink is open source and theoretically could be forked by anyone, so that's a good thing. Blink is the most advanced engine, so that's a good thing.

It's better than IE situation, that's for sure.

> having single engine for a web developer is a good thing

How many page views are by web developers?

How many by users?

So, wrong definition of good. Good isn't for the tiny amount of time something is being made, it's for the most of its life it's being used.

Beyond that, if you have no idea, perhaps you haven't viscerally experienced the IE and Netscape eras, and the awfulness of a single engine.

Blink/Chromium is objectively worse on a number of dimensions I care about, important dimensions "good" for users.

> Blink is open source and could be forked by anyone

As is WebKit, and Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.

Other browsers can still leverage WebKit, see Orion which also runs Chrome and Firefox extensions. It uses WebKit features ahead of Safari:

https://blog.kagi.com/orion-features

That's a misconception of the open source dynamics. You can't just fork a Google-backed project and expect people to follow you.

If Apple wants to position WebKit as an important independent implementation of web standards it needs to run on more than just Apple hardware. I shouldn’t have to own a Mac an an iPhone to test my code on Safari.

Why? All that matters is user count. Who says it needs to be cross platform?