> I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearl

> I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. For me personally, multiple independent implementations is a stamp of approval. It means that Google can't just sit on the standards committee, build something behind closed doors, and ship it, even if the result is open-source. It means someone outside of that one company has to understand it, and be able to implement it. It can't be ridiculously complex, or have DOCX-style "just do what proprietary implementation X does" requirements. There has to be sufficient documentation. The implementations probably won't all have the same bugs -- I've heard avionics systems have multiple independent implementations for this very reason. > Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? I fear it'll be more like Darwin. It's nice that XNU is "open source", perhaps, but nobody is taking advantage of this. I've never heard of anyone running XNU except as part of Apple's proprietary operating systems, and I've never heard of anyone forking it to run a custom version on their Apple hardware. I'm not even sure to what extent it's technically possible. I would be much less worried if the single surviving browser engine were Gecko -- not because I think it's technically superior (I don't think it is), but because I trust Mozilla a lot more than I trust Google, or even Google+Microsoft. Mozilla is not good at design but they operate out in the open.