Webkit was forked from khtml, but the original died along with Konqueror, which couldn't keep up with javascript API changes & performance.

lots of relevant interesting reading on the webkit wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

seems it was a quite complicated matter that included clashes between open source and commercial concerns.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090210230809/http://www.kdedev...

Basically became webkit. Which google forked for Blink/Chrome

Damn

I was entirely unaware that both Chrome and Safari can trace their roots back to KDE of all projects. I always just assumed big corpos like Google and Apple would just roll their own from scratch.

It was easier to just take a competitors engine, let me chase the new web standards, and slap a new UI on it. Edge and Opera both use Blink, so also trace back to KDE.

Who would have guessed that Microsoft's web browser would end up being based on KDE's web engine?

Who would have guessed that all major proprietary browsers would be using KDE's web engine, while most of the open source community used Netscape's one?

Only in the sense of a browser engine Ship of Theseus. By the time Microsoft adopted Blink that KHTML code was long gone.

It eventually forked into Webkit / Chrome.