It really looks like WebKit is going to become the standard for mobile browsing. Google, Palm, Apple, and Nokia are all in the WebKit camp and now RIM. Who does that leave now that RIM is going WebKit? Microsoft? Opera clearly has its own engine, but they don't control a platform.
The issue is that (IIRC) they use Mini on Android instead of Mobile. Better for them (Mini's already written in Java), worse for others (Mobile is a much more capable browser).
Hopefully Mini 5 will be more awesome and this will cease to be an issue. The beta looks promising.
I have to commend that turn of phrase, "stupid phone". It reminds me of "land line phone", not a term that even existed until there was enough of a viable alternative to distinguish itself from.
Opera used to be the only mobile browser that would decently render sites and support ajax (before webkit became the standard). Even now, I think, on Microsoft-based PDAs Opera offers the best available browsing experience
Given that Webkit is an open-source project with contributors from many different companies and areas of the industry, I don't see how monopoly could divert too far in the direction of non-standardness.
Really, the concept of 'monoculture' doesn't really apply to browser renderers, because a rendering engine isn't a cultural artifact. It's a medium. It's designed to be totally neutral. The only reason that we're discussing the competing browser engines right now, and discussing them in terms of culture and creativity, is an artifact of their history, not their nature.
Part of the reason for avoiding a monoculture is that you've put all your eggs in one basket; everyone's risks are linked together. While this can be good when things are going well, it can be disastrous when something goes wrong. For instance, if there's a worm that takes advantage of a bug in WebKit, it may be able to hit every single WebKit based browser out there.
Now, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact the WebKit is only one component in a browser. Each of the platform ports has a lot of platform specific code. The networking layer is different, the UI components are different, and so on. It's also somewhat mitigated by the different operating systems, architectures, compilers, and so on that make it hard to write an exploit against something like a buffer overflow, because of the heterogenous environment.
On the other hand, software that is just a small component of a browser, like libpng or libjpeg, can be all that you need to exploit a system. Look at how many vulnerabilities are reported in libpng and libjpeg on a fairly regular basis. And WebKit comes with a JavaScript interpreter that runs untrusted code by default, which can make exploits much easier as they can run code on the client side to adapt to the local environment.
A monoculture can also stifle innovation, and harm the market for new browsers. If everyone just codes to the capabilities of WebKit, it's harder for Mozilla to introduce cool new features that inspire WebKit to copy them, because a lot fewer people will pay attention. This is less likely to be a problem, however, because of the much greater market share of Gecko on the desktop.
Now, the benefits of sharing all that code and work may outweigh the risks of the monoculture. It would be nice to see a few more companies going with a Gecko based engine, however, in order to reduce the monoculture a bit. Fennec is coming along, but doesn't run on much hardware yet.
Well, yes and no. It isn't that big a deal with Webkit because it does a good job at being standards compliant. But what if the mobile phone market was converging on the IE6 rendering engine?
Competition helps drive innovation, but right now WebKit has so much forward momentum, it's hard to say that standardizing on WebKit is a bad thing. WebKit is LGPL-licensed, so if it were ever to stagnate, there's nothing preventing anyone (even companies) from forking it for their own desires.
I'd much rather see a WebKit-driven force than a proprietary one.
edit: LGPL-licensed, not just BSD. Thanks buymorechuck.
Well as a whole you have to think of it as LGPL as that is the most restrictive license among the code. But there is a bunch of code that is under the BSD.
Somebody compared the features of all these mobile browsers and discovered that they're all based on something called "WebKit", but they all end up being quite different. e.g. One browser uses a fork of a two-year old version of WebKit while another uses a fork of a one-year old version.
Open source seems to do this, doesn't it? Once upon a time there were dozens of Unices, and now there's just Linux. (Which isn't even a proper Unix.) There's Mac OS X, but that seems to serve a different market than the traditional Unix (now Linux) market.
Is it bad that we all use the same implementation of printf and strlen? It's important that something as fundamental as HTML rendering becomes plumbing that we don't even notice.
It will be the Twilight Zone if the mobile market gets a more capable, better browser market share breakdown than on desktop. Hrm, I wonder what Microsoft will use for their new Windows Phone?
I had heard windows 7 might use OpenGL ES for graphics (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2752) which would be amazing... But latest news is that it won't. It would be very nice if Microsoft also went with Webkit, but that will never happen. However the mobile gaming and browser standards are starting to be established, will Microsoft become the IE6 of mobile by not supporting OpenGL ES and WebKit or HTML5 capable browser?
It will be much harder to port games to Windows Mobile the way they are setting it up. And web development for mobile would be nice with mobile market supporting an html5 browser before desktop across the board.
I remember suggesting this idea way back when I was an intern with them a few years ago. While I doubt this is a result of that (I was merely a lowly intern-peon, and I doubt that the right people heard me).
