If Apple implements this into official Safari builds, as it seems to have done with the iPhone, how is this any different from the Netscape vs. IE feature wars of old?
Isn't this going to hurt the industry if Apple puts it in official builds before it has been declared official by any standard specification?
No it's much more different approach. This is innovation.
WebKit team introduce new features to webkit and extends css, however they document every feature and propose them to standardization. Plus all the code is open source in a permissive license.
So everyone can reimplement those extensions in our code, mozilla for example...if they want "tomorrow" firefox can have same css effects as WebKit have.
As I said this is innovation.