Reading the different comments about the "browser wars" of years gone by somewhat amuses me. In fact, I think it's actually very important to look back on that history, and remember how we got to where we are today.
Webkit was initially developed by Apple -- but it was based upon KHTML, an open-sourced browser developed for the Linux-based KDE environment. KHTML was never really going to gain any kind of noteworthy traction, as a Linux-only solution... but it's interesting that now, its successor is quite literally everywhere. Where we once had several popular web rendering engines all vying for the top of the heap, we now have Webkit... and Gecko (aka Firefox). All of the major players (save that sole holdout) have given up on their disparate attempts at developing independent rendering engines, with the vast majority switching over to some flavor of Webkit.
Mind you, I don't give
all of the credit to Apple, here: Google gets some credit, too -- or blame, depending upon how you view things. But that never would have happened, if not for Apple picking up that barely-known-open-sourced Linux browser and running with it.
But here's the crux of the matter: there was a time when Linux and "open-source" had a much more dramatic overlap, in that nearly everything that was one, was also almost exclusively the other as well. And Linux advocates were always crowing about the coming of "the year of the Linux desktop" and how they were
eventually going to take over the world, and beat both Microsoft
and Apple... while the rest of us just rolled our eyes at their unmitigated hubris. After all these years, they've still made very negligible inroads on the desktop with Linux (my daughter absolutely
hates her school issued Chromebook) but maybe, just maybe, you could argue that they
did succeed at their goals in a far more subtle fashion... by way of the humble beginnings of KHTML.
It kind'a makes you think, ya know?
(Side-note: this post was written in Firefox.
)
