[jmillikin]

  > But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for
  > being competitive with Google they must do the same
  > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their
  > plans?

They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-source engine (Gecko).

Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.

[lawnchair_larry]

How has history proven that what Apple did was "obviously" better than using Gecko?

[pyre]

I think that the point being made is that we now have 3 popular rendering engines loose on the web: WebKit, Trident, and Gecko. This diversity and competition gives us a much better ecosystem to work within than even the dual culture of IE* / Gecko.

* Trident might not even exist if not for the significant competition (or the name might not be the same were history changed).