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by gurkendoktor 4827 days ago
Just like IE6 had to catch up to stay in the market, and thus could not hurt the web? :) And installing an alternative browser was easier on Windows machines than on mobile devices.

It doesn't even matter who will be the leader - if Apple leads, Android users will lose; if Google leads, Apple users will lose. Except if people start to buy smartphones based on the HTML rendering engine.

1 comments

Except the assumption here is that improvements must necessarily be slower. But that's not necessarily true: collaboration between Chromium and WebKit was already incredibly problematic and was definitely slowing people down (http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/).

So there's a tradeoff--you're splitting people's efforts, and that's bad, but you're also removing pain points that slow down development.

Ah, gotcha. So what I'll mourn for is not the world of four days ago - but the world before Chromium and WebKit2 had split in the first place. :)