> I don't see how the fact that Chrome was secret prior to its 9/2/08 launch matters much here.
It might not, yeah. But I've heard theories that part of the reason it never made it into WebKit was how it was developed in secret and how that annoyed Apple. Together with v8, another secretly-developed project that also did not replace it's parallel in WebKit.
I won't speculate on why people make the technology decisions they do - and in this case I'm somewhat distant from the WebKit team.
I am pretty familiar with Chrome's multiprocess webview harness. This is one case where approx. 2 years ago it was incestuously tied with a lot of Chrome-the-desktop-browser internals. Part of the technical debt accumulated with the sprint to ship something. So I can see why back then it wasn't appetizing as-is.
A heroic effort by a team of engineers finally managed to separate it in 2012 into "content" (not Chrome, get it?) and set up its own shell, suite of tests, and public API for use by embedders (one of which is src/chrome, but there are others now even within Chromium). It's still not as elegant as I think any of us would like, but it is now usable from a standalone app.
One of these days I need to write a series of posts about some of the "big C++ app design" lessons we've learned as a team over the past few years.
It would be pretty ironic if Apple were actually annoyed that Chrome was developed in secret considering they forked KHTML and developed it into Safari & WebKit in secret in essentially the same way.
It might not, yeah. But I've heard theories that part of the reason it never made it into WebKit was how it was developed in secret and how that annoyed Apple. Together with v8, another secretly-developed project that also did not replace it's parallel in WebKit.