On: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

[sophiebits]

"…because it's already happened and the world hasn't exploded."

It's hard to know now what the very–long-term effects will be but John's point that the web has benefited from Chrome's creation is hard to argue with. As for whether it's benefited more or less than if Chrome had used a different rendering engine, we'll never know…

[gcp → sophiebits]

I believe KTHML->WebKit has pretty much illustrated that having standards that allow new implementations to be developed is a good, essential thing.

We'd have been in an interesting, and perhaps worse state if Safari and Chrome were both Gecko based instead of competing therewith.

[jeresig → gcp]

That's an interesting assumption to make: Just because Safari or Chrome hypothetically used Gecko doesn't mean that competition would've halted. Why couldn't it have been any different from when Chrome used WebKit as its basis and absolutely trounced Safari?

[gcp → jeresig]

I wouldn't say Chrome WebKit trounced Safari WebKit. The browser surrounding the engine was better. This means little wrt. to the engine.

[malandrew → gcp]

Why would we be in a worse state if Chrome and Safari were Gecko based?

[gcp → malandrew]

We'd have one less rendering engine.

[dclowd9901 → sophiebits]

I think we should at least touch on the real reason Chrome is the de facto standard and baseline for web page rendering: it's essentially to front end development what IntelliJ is to backend.

[likeclockwork → dclowd9901]

It is very nice to develop for.

Firefox isn't terrible but its developer tools always seem a little clunkier than Chrome's.