A browser engine is an awfully portable thing. For a consumer, switching between them (e.g. from Firefox to Safari, whatever) is just a question of minor UI skinning. I don't see that it "benefits" any OS in particular. Assuming it's universally better, Android and Tizen would need to port from WebKit and Firefox from Gecko. If it confers a true competitive advantage, they'll all do it. If not, some probably won't.
For myself, I'm skeptical. There's really nothing "wrong enough" with Gecko or WebKit that I can see another option really being that much better. Developers love to rewrite stuff (obviously both Gecko and WebKit are already effectively rewrites of pre-existing technologies), but the market has a long history of not being nearly as enthused. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
>Developers love to rewrite stuff (obviously both Gecko and WebKit are already effectively rewrites of pre-existing technologies), but the market has a long history of not being nearly as enthused.
Actually your examples nullify your argument.
Mozilla would be dead today without Gecko, ie with the old Netscape code piled.
KHTML would have gone nowhere much if it wasn't for the Webkit rewrite.
So in both cases, it was the rewrites that made those engines break out.
Surely the impact of Webkit has been greater than that of Gecko? Webkit made decent mobile browsing possible, and until recently Gecko wasn't available in mobile browsers.
Gecko did put a dent in desktop browser usage share early on (when Safari was Mac-only, and Safari for Windows has never caught on – for good reasons), but the desktop is quickly becoming the second screen. Nowadays, most sites are built for Webkit first.
Safari was released in January of 2003. Soon after, Microsoft ceased developing Internet Explorer for Mac. Almost two years later, Firefox 1.0 was released, and it took quite some time after that for it to become a good browser. In the meanwhile, plenty of us had been using a Gecko based browser for years: Netscape.
I'd make the argument that without Gecko the web would have become even more entangled with and dependent on IE. That would have smothered WebKit in the cradle, making it impossible for anyone outside of Microsoft to make a decent mobile web browser.
Until recently, Servo has been labeled as an experiment, and they've claimed that it isn't intended to replace Gecko. I'm skeptical about this claim, but it does suggests that replacing Gecko isn't its primary objective. If nothing else, the insights gained from developing Servo will provide insight into future development of Gecko.
For myself, I'm skeptical. There's really nothing "wrong enough" with Gecko or WebKit that I can see another option really being that much better. Developers love to rewrite stuff (obviously both Gecko and WebKit are already effectively rewrites of pre-existing technologies), but the market has a long history of not being nearly as enthused. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.