[bobsy]

I think it is obvious that WebKit has won and by a margin when it comes to browser engines.

For Opera it is the best move for them. They can now focus the majority of their development time on making the browser great instead of putting a decent chunk of their development time in effectively replicating what WebKit does. I think in the coming year or so Opera will be become a far better browser for it.

As for Mozilla and IE. You would expect Microsoft have more than enough resources to keep working on Trident/Lynx whatever it is called.

For Mozilla is their OS tied to their own engine? I don't know how committed they are to it. For all the releases of Firefox tabs still aren't sandboxed and phpmyadmin often freezes the entire browser when looking at monster tables... perhaps they would benefit from spending more time improving the browser and less time working on rendering.

I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera had open sourced their browser engine with WebKit. Perhaps we would have seen a split and more competition in this area.

Now it is who has the $$$ to continue to develop their own propriety engine.

[gcp]

I don't know how committed they are to it.

Extremely, especially in this context. The reason why Opera is switching (web compatibility issues if you're not the dominant implementation) is exactly the reason why Mozilla would fight a switch with tooth and nail - and remember that unlike Opera they cannot care for profit when doing so.

Here's an extensive reply from a Firefox developer: http://www.quora.com/Mozilla-Firefox/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-...

I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera had open sourced their browser engine with WebKit.

I have no idea what you mean.

[mtgx]

He means that there are different parts of a browser you can focus on and innovate there. If the rendering engine was 'out of the way", and didn't have to worry about that part, they could focus a lot more on other stuff.

Right now Microsoft has to focus on making Trident catch-up with webkit, and it's still 2 years behind webkit in HTML5 features. Go to html5test.com and see how far IE10 is. It's more behind than Chrome 10 was when IE9 launched 2 years ago.

[Moto7451]

Mozilla has been open source since day one.

Mozilla's engine at one point was the go to for a cross platform embedable browser but things changed: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...

Edit: Should clarify, Mozilla as an entity that releases web browsers, not "Mozilla" as in the Netscape days.

[bzbarsky]

Uh.. Mozilla's browser engine has been open source since 1998 or so. It predates WebKit even existing.