
Why Mozilla Matters and Won’t Switch to WebKit - ckcheng
https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/why-mozilla-matters-and-wont-switch-to-webkit/
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phendrenad2
I always felt that the fear of browser monoculture was misguided. Does anyone
suffer under the current Unix monoculture? BSD market shares are a sliver of
Linux's.

It seems to me that the assertion that a browser monoculture would be a bad
thing stems from the presumption that WebKit is controlled by the iron fist of
Apple, and Chromium by the iron fist of Google. It seems like an unintentional
damning of open-source. After all, what good is Chromium being open-sourced if
Google effectively controls the codebase, and no forks are realistically
possible, because the codebase is too complex for the community or even a
small company like Mozilla to take on? (Microsoft has managed it, of course,
but that's another megacorp).

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ckcheng
Microsoft using Chromium might moderate Google's influence on it and in turn
the web.

With Mozilla's recent layoffs etc, it seems in the long run they might be
better off building Firefox on Webkit. It'll strengthen Webkit's position as
an alternative to Chromium and stop splitting the non-chromium vote, so to
speak.

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l1ghthouse
(2013)

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csilverman
Heh, yeah, I didn't realize what year it was until I got to "Mozilla’s CTO
Brendan Eich" and thought "Wait—that guy? Now when _was_ this..."

