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Agreed. Monoculture is always a poor situation to find yourself in. It's bad in agriculture, it's bad in politics, and it's bad in computing. Not only does mon
by ryandvm 16y ago
Agreed. Monoculture is always a poor situation to find yourself in. It's bad in agriculture, it's bad in politics, and it's bad in computing.
Not only does monoculture kill innovation and induce complacency on account of a lack of competition; it creates the perfect security conditions for malevolent exploitation. Imagine a security bug that is exploitable in 99% of the industry's web browsers. Yikes.
We are actually in the perfect position right now. Webkit (props to the original KHTML team) is receiving accolades by the heap and has put intense pressure on both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident teams. The result will be 3 very fast rendering engines (and if it suits them, they'll be standards compliant too).
- wtallis 16y agoI don't think a monoculture has to be a bad thing when it's not backed by an associated monopoly. WebKit is used by Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and almost everybody's mobile browsers, but they all have different goals and requirements. They share code where it makes sense, but add to it their own GUIs and other innovations. Competition on the basis of performance is as healthy as ever, and the WebKit world has a lot going on in the way of new features and security. I think that the benefits of standardization and code sharing have far outweighed the "monoculture" dangers for UNIX, and I see no reason why a similar balance between diversity and compatibility can't be achieved for web browsers.