Theoretically yes, mono-culture is not a good thing. Having more from-scratch rendering engines would be good for the robustness of web standards. However web standards are hugely complex at this point and it becomes increasingly infeasible to implement from scratch. With WebKit at least you have an open-source pluggable engine, so you're not talking about branded product monopolies where one or two bad actors can foul things up for everyone. An IE6-like scenario is completely impossible with WebKit.

This has always struck me as a really poor argument. For one thing, because webkit itself is by far the youngest rendering engine around and also among the most complete. You can't reasonably argue both for a webkit monoculture and an unreasonably high barrier to entry.

Gecko was an open source ostensibly pluggable engine (even MSIE is pluggable, in fact), so why did we need webkit to bring about the monoculture? Would advocates of it have been satisfied if it had come about then? Probably not, and rightly so, because Gecko has stagnated, as most large codebases managed by people with specific interests do.

And we are talking about branded product monopolies here. Should Google and/or Apple fall behind who's going to take up the cause of moving things forward again? People don't use webkit, they use Chrome and Safari.

What do you think exactly is my argument? I'm just talking about the way things are, not some ideal that I'm holding up. Also, your commentary has major holes in it:

> webkit itself is by far the youngest rendering engine around and also among the most complete

WebKit was formally released by Apple almost 8 years ago after being in development secretly for at least a couple years before that. That encompasses the entire era of the modern mobile web. It was based on KHTML which I believe was released in the late 90s, in an era when CSS was barely off the ground and not used in any meaningful capacity by web designers of the time. That's the same era when Gecko was first developed and released as a clean break from the previous Netscape rendering engine which was deemed a dead-end from an engineering standpoint. So no, WebKit is not new.

> Gecko was an open source ostensibly pluggable engine (even MSIE is pluggable, in fact), so why did we need webkit to bring about the monoculture?

I don't know, but neither Gecko nor IE was ever meaningfully used as a pluggable engine in a major consumer product outside of the original organization's control. I don't know if there were technical reasons why they were never embraced on a wider basis, but they weren't, therefore they are not very informative on the question of what happens with an open-source rendering engine monoculture when multiple large parties and user bases are relying on it.

> *Should Google and/or Apple fall behind who's going to take up the cause of moving things forward again? People don't use webkit, they use Chrome and Safari.

This sentence is hard to argue because it's a non-sequitur. First of all, anyone can take up the torch any time. The only time this hasn't happened in the history of the web was when Microsoft has a monopoly and their core interests were being eroded by the web. Unlike IE, WebKit is LGPL, so anyone is free to start innovating from the current state of the art. As to the second point that people use Chrome and Safari, that's not entirely true. On Android for instance the default browser is not Chrome. Also, WebKit is being embedded in all kinds of devices. But beyond that, does the fact that people use Chrome and Safari give Google/Apple to the power to hold innovation hostage? First, they are competitors, but even if they colluded, it would be very hard for them to hold off the whole market if everyone else's web browsers were getting better and better. This is not the Windows-monopoly-plus-unsavvy-consumer market of the early 2000s. Everyone is used to computers now and in the web era they won't be corralled into an inferior platform by sheer business inertia.

I did not say it was brand new, but it is the youngest and that's inarguable. It's pre-webkit state also was not exactly much to write home about, and I say that having been a user of Konqueror back in the day.

Google seems to be replacing the AOSP browser in Android with Chrome, btw.

I think you underestimate the non-technical cost of entry of a new browser by a lot while overestimating the technical. I'm not saying that it's a small feat to make a compliant browser by any means, but if a non-Google company were to attempt to market a new browser the way Google did (including ads of equivalent value to links on Google's front page), it would be absurdly expensive. There's a reason all the dominant and growing players in this space are massive corporations: a plucky underdog stands little chance against Google, Apple, or Microsoft. So who else's browsers would they have to hold off exactly?

No, it's only 15 years old out of 20 years of the history of the web. Sheesh.

I think you're missing the point. Firefox & IE are browsers, WebKit is a browser engine, market share has nothing to do with WebKit. Chrome gained market share because instead of reinventing the browser engine, they improved on it and re-branded it. John's point seems to be that IE & Mozilla using WebKit wouldn't result in a mono-culture because they could still produce their own features and not worry about reinventing the engine.

That assumes that the WebKit engine is already as good as we'll need it to be or can be improved as needed in arbitrary ways.

But it's not, and it can't be.

Think about how something like the Servo project would happen (or not) in a WebKit monoculture world.