Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

* Indeed, open source helps a lot. It is amazing how far KHTML has gotten. But still, no standards would mean no Opera, no Mozilla, no any other entrants to the game.*

Not necessarily, it would still be possible for them to embed webkit or even to re-implement it.

Webkit would simply become the reference implementation.

View on HN

Reimplementing it would not be an option. Making WebKit the reference implementation would give Google and Apple such an enormous advantage in development cycles that any browser that didn't use it would be unable to compete. You'd be expelling everyone but Google and Apple from the W3C.

If WebKit becomes the standard, every user from now until forever will be using the same pile of C++ to browse. That may be fine to you; I personally don't think that WebKit is so good as to make it the gold standard for the Web. Imagine if that had happened with NCSA Mosaic...

If it is open source why would google and apple have a huge advantage?

Surely anybody else could even fork webkit if they so desired.

Having one pile of C++ to browse beats having multiple piles of C++ all with their own bugs an eccentricities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com