Google Introduces "Blink", A Fork Of WebKit
However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
Whether this was done intentionally or not, this move will hurt iOS to some extent. Google will begin pushing new code improvements to its fork, Blink, rather than contributing to WebKit itself.
Blink is still open-source, so theoretically the additions to Blink could be reviewed by third-parties and merged back into the community WebKit tree. However, although that may be feasible initially, if Google really diversifies Blink’s codebase from WebKit’s, that process becomes convoluted and unwieldy.