WebKit and jQuery -- and Bootstrap -- are becoming the new 'Win32 API.'
With browser engines things get a little more political - mono-culture is not a good thing. But at least Firefox holds enough of a market share, and of course IE is now a much better player in this space - so WebKit can't get away with too much silliness.
But it's not, and it can't be.
Think about how something like the Servo project would happen (or not) in a WebKit monoculture world.
Gecko was an open source ostensibly pluggable engine (even MSIE is pluggable, in fact), so why did we need webkit to bring about the monoculture? Would advocates of it have been satisfied if it had come about then? Probably not, and rightly so, because Gecko has stagnated, as most large codebases managed by people with specific interests do.
And we are talking about branded product monopolies here. Should Google and/or Apple fall behind who's going to take up the cause of moving things forward again? People don't use webkit, they use Chrome and Safari.
> webkit itself is by far the youngest rendering engine around and also among the most complete
WebKit was formally released by Apple almost 8 years ago after being in development secretly for at least a couple years before that. That encompasses the entire era of the modern mobile web. It was based on KHTML which I believe was released in the late 90s, in an era when CSS was barely off the ground and not used in any meaningful capacity by web designers of the time. That's the same era when Gecko was first developed and released as a clean break from the previous Netscape rendering engine which was deemed a dead-end from an engineering standpoint. So no, WebKit is not new.
> Gecko was an open source ostensibly pluggable engine (even MSIE is pluggable, in fact), so why did we need webkit to bring about the monoculture?
I don't know, but neither Gecko nor IE was ever meaningfully used as a pluggable engine in a major consumer product outside of the original organization's control. I don't know if there were technical reasons why they were never embraced on a wider basis, but they weren't, therefore they are not very informative on the question of what happens with an open-source rendering engine monoculture when multiple large parties and user bases are relying on it.
> *Should Google and/or Apple fall behind who's going to take up the cause of moving things forward again? People don't use webkit, they use Chrome and Safari.
This sentence is hard to argue because it's a non-sequitur. First of all, anyone can take up the torch any time. The only time this hasn't happened in the history of the web was when Microsoft has a monopoly and their core interests were being eroded by the web. Unlike IE, WebKit is LGPL, so anyone is free to start innovating from the current state of the art. As to the second point that people use Chrome and Safari, that's not entirely true. On Android for instance the default browser is not Chrome. Also, WebKit is being embedded in all kinds of devices. But beyond that, does the fact that people use Chrome and Safari give Google/Apple to the power to hold innovation hostage? First, they are competitors, but even if they colluded, it would be very hard for them to hold off the whole market if everyone else's web browsers were getting better and better. This is not the Windows-monopoly-plus-unsavvy-consumer market of the early 2000s. Everyone is used to computers now and in the web era they won't be corralled into an inferior platform by sheer business inertia.
Google seems to be replacing the AOSP browser in Android with Chrome, btw.
I think you underestimate the non-technical cost of entry of a new browser by a lot while overestimating the technical. I'm not saying that it's a small feat to make a compliant browser by any means, but if a non-Google company were to attempt to market a new browser the way Google did (including ads of equivalent value to links on Google's front page), it would be absurdly expensive. There's a reason all the dominant and growing players in this space are massive corporations: a plucky underdog stands little chance against Google, Apple, or Microsoft. So who else's browsers would they have to hold off exactly?
Software monoculture is not inherently a bad thing; it can be a good thing. Re-inventing the wheel isn't progress. The world is much better off with Linux than 20 different Unix variants. And the world is likely better off with WebKit than dozens of different browser variants.
The issue isn't having a software monoculture, it's who is in control of it. The situation with both Linux and WebKit is that we have all the benefits of a monoculture and very few of the downsides.
jQuery and Bootstrap, no. They are useful libraries, but developers can choose not to use them and still succeed. Few of the biggest websites use them, for instance--they mostly write their own javascript and templates.
But they all test against WebKit.
Only our smaller, cobbled together pages use jQuery. If it grows, we switch to something that meets our idiomatic style better: smaller modules in a CommonJS/AMD style.
JQuery takes over your code, and it seems like WebKit is doing the same thing. Some of our developers only include -webkit prefixes until I complain loud enough for them to throw in the rest: -moz, -o-, -ms.
I hope FF never switches, because then we'd be even more locked in.
So I freaking hope not.