I really hate to see TechCrunch giving credence to the notion that the number of times someone commits to a given codebase is somhow representative of the actual contribution to the project. Granted, the author does say: "The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones." but he then goes on to say that "[the graph] does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project." Ignore the parenthetical, and it feels like the author is ignoring the issue: commits does not equal code quality.

After all, and I know that I'm over simplifying the point, (I think this is safe to say) but didn't Apple build out most of the core functionality -- the rendering engine, while what has been going on for the past couple months to a years is just adding features and extending what the base browser is? You can't determine that type of input based on commits alone.

Edit: Clarify core functionality.