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Comment by eddieplan9 | Hacker News Reader

It also reminded me of Apple cutting off Internet Explorer for Mac[1] and went with building Safari. See how that worked out for them (and all devices relying on WebKit).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

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Keep in mind that Google maps are arguably the best in the world - IE for Mac was a pretty dreadful browser.

True, but Safari was based on KHTML which was being worked on for a long time and was pretty comparable(and even in some cases better) than Firefox and IE at the time. Can you say the same about iOS 6 maps and Google Maps?

I'm sure the TomTom deal will change things fairly soon. The agreement was signed three months ago, and by then Maps for iOS 6 was clearly already too advanced to incorporate much of what TomTom can offer. I suppose we'll see updates coming thick and fast from here to Christmas, especially considering the current wave of negativity surrounding the app.

I wouldn't be surprised if Cook decided next week that they might as well buy TomTom outright.

Speaking as one of the people who worked on adapting khtml into Wbkit, no, it was no comparable with Mozilla or IE at the time. It took a major effort to get to shippable performance, web comparability, standards compliance, and quality. Check out the first 2 or 3 years of WebKit commits on trac.webkit.org and you will see some incredibly basic stuff.

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