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> A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters

Active X would like to disagree with you. We're currently dealing with a massive (revenue/company) product that only runs under IE < 10 because it still uses Active X.

I don't think a common rendering engine is at all a bad thing. Maybe two to keep them honest. But blink + webkit + trident (?) + Gecko (?) seem like wasted engineering talent.

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South Korea has(or had, they may have changed it in the last few months) a law that enforces the usage of ActiveX for everything which needs security (e. g. online banking, online shopping)

That sounds like a prime example of incredible technical incompetence of the lawmakers or incredibly good lobbying by MS. Maybe both.

It made some sense at the time the law was conceived. SSL was crippled to uselessness by US export restrictions. IE 6 had a monopoly. So they built their own much more secure encryption (using ActiveX to plug into IE) and mandated its use for everything that matters.

The incompetence was in mandating a certain implementation instead of writing a technology-neutral law requiring a certain security level.

Interesting! So bad actions by the US gov led to bad results for US companies....

Bad actions by the US gov led to bad workarounds by other govs

Blink and WebKit don't have much overlap.

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