mrgan:

Jim Ray calls out Gruber for being pleased with how WebKit is dominating the mobile-browser market:

(…) with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture. A few years ago, Gecko was the best rendering engine available, then WebKit came out of nowhere to beat Gecko at its own game, and faster, to boot. Now Gecko and WebKit, on the desktop, anyway, are pushing each other to only get better. I’d love to see that kind of competition in the mobile space as well.

Two observations, both subjective:

1. Mozilla has been dragging its feet when it comes to adding next-gen rendering features (the sort that may some day make Flash unnecessary), focusing instead on everything above the Gecko engine. They are also woefully unprepared to match, let alone exceed, WebKit’s embedded performance.
   
   You could argue that Firefox is a better browser (if you love its extensions and location bar) but the engine is falling behind badly. Both users and developers stand to gain more by focusing on the engine that works great now and looks to have a bright future than by arguing hypotheticals.
2. I am reasonably sure that development of WebKit is fueled by the desire to do amazing things using web technologies, and not by an urge to compete with anyone; as far as I can tell, the WebKit team isn’t paying too much attention to what Mozilla is up to.
   
   Put another way, even if Firefox, IE, and Opera halted development today and added no new features, Apple and others on the WebKit team would be working their butts off to make the web richer - because they want it for themselves.