14 DAY TRIAL // Google's decision to stop working on WebKit and instead develop Blink, a WebKit fork, impacts a lot more things than just Chrome and Chrome OS. Obviously, it impacts Opera, which is also adopting Blink. But it goes beyond that.
For one, it completely changes the browser engine landscape, particularly on mobile devices. For the past few years, mostly because of Google's adoption, WebKit has become the dominant force.
On smartphones, it's used on the vast majority of devices, it's used by default on Android and on iOS. On iOS there isn't even a choice. In practice, it means that there is only one engine for mobile devices.
On the desktop, Chrome is the most popular browser. With Opera moving to WebKit, it seemed like there were only three major rendering engines left, WebKit, Microsoft's Trident and Mozilla's Gecko.
There already is a trend of web developers creating sites and apps that worked on WebKit without bothering to test them in anything else.
That may not seem like much of a problem, but it meant that web standards were ignored and WebKit became the de facto standard. It had happened once again with Internet Explorer 6 and it wasn't pretty.
Blink changes all that. With Google and Opera on board, right off the bat, Blink will own more than half of the mobile market and at least a third of the desktop market. Webkit will own a significant chunk in the mobile space, but will be virtually non-existent on the desktop, since only Safari uses it.
Obviously, Blink and WebKit are, for now, identical. In the short term, Google is focusing on cleaning up the code, so there won't be any meaningful differences as far as web developers are concerned for a while.
Eventually, Blink will be different enough to be a separate engine. Web developers will have to test their work with more engines and browsers, but that means they'll have to write better quality code and it means web standards continue to matter.