It seems to me that Google has been a better influence with Webkit than Apple has. In my day-to-day work the only time Safari comes up is on iOS, and only then because we have no other choice.

The only time recently I've opened Safari on the desktop is to debug some obscure Javascript deficiency that only existed on that browser that also happened to exist in iOS.

Please remember that Apple created Webkit from KHTML, without them Chrome would have been way behind where they are now, both in terms of technology and pushing a new rendering engine. They may well have purchased Opera...

Toady Google have more resources invested in Blink than Apple do in Safari, but don't forget how we got here.

I know all that and I believe there has been controversy over Apple and KHTML. But, I see it as a matter that Apple started playing but dropped the ball for Google to pick up to move forward.

There's no telling where things would be if Google had gone a different route. What if they bought Opera? What if they forked KHTML themselves? It could have been better, it could have been worse. I don't speculate on that, I just react to what I see. Right now, to me, Google has been better about moving things forward with Webkit than Apple has in quite a while.