Google forked WebKit for Chromium in 2013 as the browser engine Blink.
Chrome originally used WebKit, the open-source engine Apple had developed for Safari from the KDE project's KHTML and KJS components. Google added substantial Chrome-specific work, including a multiprocess architecture, so its version increasingly diverged from Apple's upstream code. On April 3, 2013, Google announced Blink as a fork of WebKit's WebCore component.
The fork let Chromium developers remove code they did not need and make architectural changes without negotiating every change upstream. Blink therefore became the rendering engine used by Chromium and browsers built on Chromium, including Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Brave. It is separate from V8, Google's JavaScript engine: Blink renders web content, while V8 executes JavaScript.
A common mix-up is calling Blink a fork of all WebKit software or of V8. More precisely, Google forked WebCore, WebKit's rendering component, and combined it with Chromium's surrounding browser code. Safari and browsers on Apple's platforms continue to use WebKit because Apple's platform rules require it.