Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.
I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.
Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".
In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.
If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.
There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).
So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.
The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.
Maybe there's another reason I've missed, though!
If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".
Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.
That's actually being done in the Serenity OS project! HTML renderer, JS interpreter, and Web Browser, from scratch:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55beChggmvk-s...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55be0Nfytz9q2...
The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.
Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room
Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.
The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
> They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.
But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.
On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.
and almost all of Webkit has been rewritten from the time of the fork from khtml.
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)