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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

There will come a time when WebKit isn't innovating the fastest, just like the previous darling browser engines (IE included). A dominant WebKit engine isn't really any more desirable than a dominant IE.

I would much prefer that MS wise up about the special requirements of a browser engine and do as well as they can with their own. Opera is more than welcome to switch to Webkit though. :)

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Agreed. Monoculture is always a poor situation to find yourself in. It's bad in agriculture, it's bad in politics, and it's bad in computing.

Not only does monoculture kill innovation and induce complacency on account of a lack of competition; it creates the perfect security conditions for malevolent exploitation. Imagine a security bug that is exploitable in 99% of the industry's web browsers. Yikes.

We are actually in the perfect position right now. Webkit (props to the original KHTML team) is receiving accolades by the heap and has put intense pressure on both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident teams. The result will be 3 very fast rendering engines (and if it suits them, they'll be standards compliant too).

I don't think a monoculture has to be a bad thing when it's not backed by an associated monopoly. WebKit is used by Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and almost everybody's mobile browsers, but they all have different goals and requirements. They share code where it makes sense, but add to it their own GUIs and other innovations. Competition on the basis of performance is as healthy as ever, and the WebKit world has a lot going on in the way of new features and security.

I think that the benefits of standardization and code sharing have far outweighed the "monoculture" dangers for UNIX, and I see no reason why a similar balance between diversity and compatibility can't be achieved for web browsers.

At least with a dominant WebKit, everyone has access to the source code, and can either submit their improvements back to the core maintainers, or they can fork WebKit if the maintainers refuse to allow their improvements. With a dominant IE, you're at the mercy of some "unknown" Microsoft engineers/managers finding enough time in their schedule to implement those improvements.

How is that any better than an engine programmed by experts? How is forking going to help us getting uniform display of the elements?

Seems to be working just fine for webkit already.

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