[tolmasky]

They are different things because its unrealistic to fork WebKit and get any significant market share. So even though you might make a worthwhile change to the engine, realistically you need that change to be accepted by WebKit proper for it to matter.

[jeresig]

Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.

[tolmasky]

The response was more in regards to the grand-OP's desire for a lower level extensible runtime and lamentation about plugins, more than a comparison to standards now that I think about it. In other words, which web is more open:

1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.).

or

2. One in which perhaps all the browsers were closed source, but adding new features to any such browser really was just a matter of referencing a script on a web page?

The questions is more or less only useful as a thought experiment by this point of course, and in particular I don't feel that the "standards" process was ever particularly open to begin with, so I don't think things have, or will, necessarily get much worse.

[kenjackson]

I like how you've stated it, and made my original premise less confrontational and more of a question about what you value as "open".