Why Mozilla Matters and Won’t Switch to WebKit
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It seems to me that the assertion that a browser monoculture would be a bad thing stems from the presumption that WebKit is controlled by the iron fist of Apple, and Chromium by the iron fist of Google. It seems like an unintentional damning of open-source. After all, what good is Chromium being open-sourced if Google effectively controls the codebase, and no forks are realistically possible, because the codebase is too complex for the community or even a small company like Mozilla to take on? (Microsoft has managed it, of course, but that's another megacorp).
With Mozilla's recent layoffs etc, it seems in the long run they might be better off building Firefox on Webkit. It'll strengthen Webkit's position as an alternative to Chromium and stop splitting the non-chromium vote, so to speak.