Yes, but the latter is a fork of the former's core components.

And WebKit is a fork of KHTML, so...

It was forked over 10 years ago now. I doubt their shared past is even recognizable now.

There were substantial differences even from day one. As I recall one of the differences of opinion that was a driving cause of the fork was the multiprocess model; WebKit team wanted that to be part of the framework, letting any WebKit-embedding app get it for “free”, whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

> with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

Isn't that what happened anyway? The non-Chromium dists of Blink like Electron and WebView2 both employ the same multi-process approach as Chrome.exe (and my RAM availability is suffering for it...)

Electron bundles Chromium, not Blink directly. Believe this is true of WebView2 too but am not well-versed in Windows internals.

In fact I’m not aware of any major non-Chromium usages of Blink, except maybe in Qt (where it replaced WebKit a few years ago) but I’m not sure about that either.

Nah, QtWebEngine is using Chromium, not Blink directly

> whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

Is that why Electron basically means Chromium?

doesn't matter that it's a fork if behaviour / features diverge like they do

...sort of...

They diverged from a common starting point, but they did diverge, pulled apart by wildly different priorities, contributors, and usecases.