> Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
Except that is hardly the case.Competition is good,that's what forced IE to evolve as it was losing marketshares. But let's not kid ourself thinking all the players are in it for web standards.
I think IE supremacy was different and much worse than a Webkit supremacy would be because Webkit isn't controlled by a single company and is open source. Different Webkit implementations still compete for marketshare.
I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
I understand the problems of monocultures when they are controlled by a single profit-motivated company, but is a monoculture based on open source software so bad? Besides, both webkit and *nix systems aren't exactly monocultures because they have so many different implementations.
Webkit is controlled by Apple, basically. If you want to make big changes (i.e. Chrome) you're going to have to fork it and merge Apple's changes periodically.
This will make things harder to maintain, and if you have enough investment, you'll eventually want to fork it (Blink).
People don't really use different Webkits - there's Chrome and Safari (incompatible forks) and Opera (declining market share) and that's about it, really.
Making all OS' Nix would again be a bad thing, because there'd be no level playing field.
The current Unix players are similar in some ways, but have different APIs and behaviours (so OpenBSD has better randomness, Linux has some cool perf monitoring stuff, OS X has its GUI lib) and what you'd essentially find is that there'd be loads of incompatibilities that'd make developing cross-platform a nightmare. Since not all devs run all common operating systems, it'd be hard to motivate fixes.
So, you'd develop for one of them, not all - and then you're not in a much better place than the situation with Windows - where you can share a lot of your code cross-platform anyway, or write in a JIT'd language etc.
> I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
How?
Windows and Unix have evolved entirely different ecosystems. Most developers have a tendency to exist entirely in 1 or the other with only a little interaction between them.
I personally am able to use either environment comfortably, but that's actually a big part of the value I bring to certain environments. But that isn't the norm.
For a developer's perspective being able to write once and have it work everywhere is pretty darn big "pro". What are the practical "cons" that outweigh this?
> Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
I agree, as long as they are by companies, organizations, and teams other than Microsoft. And that's what we indeed have already: Gecko, WebKit, Blink (and Blink is new, which is great). I very much look forward to additional open engines (and POSIX-compliant operating systems, for that matter) by companies, organizations, and even unofficial teams of dedicated individuals that are not Microsoft, of which there are many.
Microsoft is in much less of a position to screw with standards than they were back when IE was a problem. I'd be more worried about Apple and Google running the browser show if I were you.
I was more concerned when Microsoft did. I have no issue with Apple or Google. In fact, if it weren't for Google and Mozilla, we'd all be using IE6 right now.
I don't have any concerns with Google, but Apple's "No browsers allowed except for new UIs tacked on the iOS WebKit framework" is not my favorite thing ever.
Later edit : Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.