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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

And then there were three. Even more reason for Apple to never allow anything but WebKit on iOS. This monoculture isn't good for the web.

edit: Guess the pro-monoculture folks flagged this.

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I don't see why monoculture (as long as the browser engine is good) is bad. Unlike the era of Internet Explorer, Chromium-based browsers are actually consistent with official standards.

On websites like "caniuse.com", a site which checks for support of the latest JS/HTML/CSS features, Chrome consistently ranks 1st. These features are all official features of the HTML/JS spec, not arbitrary Google-specific extensions.

Ensuring that more people use a browser with the Chromium-engine will allow web developers to use the latest features.

WebKit is a form of harmful monoculture. I'm ok with Blink's monoculture because it is probably the best rendering engine out there and inferior engines can't compete. But Apple's is creating an artificial monoculture by only allowing WebKit on iOS. This allows Apple to not innovative on WebKit and deliberately cripple new web technologies, so that people are forced to make native apps.

So webkit is not monoculture? Are you forgetting about konqueror?

How could it be a monoculture with 14% market share?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Why are you citing Safari's 14% market share when the person to whom you responded was stating that if it's true that Edge will become Chromium-based, then browsers running on Chromium will represent something like 66% of the world's web engine share. Heck, it's already 59%, over half. With Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge (or whatever Anaheim will become), we're talking two thirds of all browsers being based on one engine.

That's the monoculture.

Edit: didn't realise you were responding to someone refuting what you had said, haha. so basically we agree, I just thought you were someone else.

I'm saying that WebKit can't be a monoculture because Safari only has 14% market share. It doesn't matter if other devices and browsers that no one actually uses are WebKit.

Gotcha. Yeah, it seems a lot of people are stuck in the past idea that WebKit dominates. It used to dominate in mobile and it certainly a lot of WebKit-only extensions eventually became standards — but those days are behind us for everything other than iOS.

And while iOS has the greatest market share for mobile, you're right, WebKit doesn't have the greatest market share for general browsers. That's definitely Chromium, now on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, your mum's toaster, just about every 'native' web app…

Side note: I guess we should really be saying Blink, that's the name of the engine. But even if, say, you use Google Chrome on iOS, backed by WebKit, that usually makes you a Google Chrome, backed by Blink, user on the desktop.

That person meant that if all the main browsers move to Chromium, then it will dominate and cause a monoculture; the same way that Internet Explorer caused a monoculture in the 90s and 00s.

Pointing out that there are competitors doesn't change that their presence doesn't overthrow the monoculture. After all, Gecko was around for a long time and Firefox did become very popular very quickly after version 2; but realistically, it took until Apple put WebKit on iOS for any real dents to be made.

Also, I think Konqueror still uses KHTML by default. I don't know if Konqueror tracks WebKit, but I think they're rather different these days.

Unfortunately there's near 0 development behind KHTML and Konqueror. That's been the case for many years now.

KHTML was the only community driven browser engine and thank god for it. God knows what the browse landscape would've been without it.

That's a shame. Back when I was a full-time Linuxer, I used Konqueror as my default browser. The good ol' days of KHTML.

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