In defense of monoculture

Sarcasm setting: Subtle (some of you will miss this disclaimer)

In recent months I've noticed a decided trend towards considering WebKit to be the Internet Default Browser. This is nothing but good, as that is most definitely a driver of industry innovation. The decision by Opera to drop Presto and adopt WebKit was one I cheered; for years Opera has been pissed on by web developers as 'weird', so hopefully this will cause more sites to put that browser-badge on their Supported Browser shelf.

Such monocultures are actually good for the web, as they provide a driver for innovation. Only having to build web-sites to a single quirk-standard makes it a lot easier to create well-working web-sites, and that drives growth. More startups can get out the door faster in order make more money, and as we all know it's startups who disrupt industries. The fact that so many of these startups are using Chrome (and by extension WebKit) as their standard browser is a clear indication that we're heading towards another era of monoculture centered growth.

WebKit conquered the old standard for two big, big reasons:

1. It works on mobile. Mobile is where all the growth is these days, so working on mobile is a major, major thing. And Microsoft wasn't the first mover in this space, Apple (WebKit) was. Firefox (Gecko) doesn't work on mobile (until very, very recently), so it wasn't going to do it either.
2. It also works on Macs. So many webdevs are doing their dev-work on Apple hardware these days that "works on a Mac" is a key driver for growth. IE doesn't. WebKit does.

The modern web is a decidedly heterogeneous place, so the ability to run on anything is very key. IE can't, Firefox only recently got that ability, but WebKit has already been doing that for years. A WebKit monoculture is in the cards.

At least until Google decided to fork it. We don't need more fragmentation in the web rendering spaces, we need less. This saddens me.