I'd say we already see the benefits of having so many people work together on WebKit. Would we be better off if Google had to create and maintain its own desktop and mobile web rendering engine from scratch? If there's a monoculture problem in mobile web browsing, it's due to the disproportionately large percentage of it that's done using Mobile Safari on iOS. Single-vendor/closed-platform will always be a problem. WebKit is neither.
Yes, over-use of vendor prefixes in CSS and other browser-specific features is bad. But that's an authoring issue as much as it's a WebKit issue. Having -moz-, -o-, and -webkit-* plus JavaScript shims to hide the differences in multiple browsers is a great argument for standards, but not a great argument for a larger variety of independently developed and maintained web rendering engines.
> I'd say we already see the benefits of having so many people work together on WebKit.
Of course, as I already agreed before. There are benefits to centralization.
It's a question of degree, not absolutes. As I said, 10 or 100 might be too many rendering engines, while 1 is too few. 2 or 3 seems, to me, to be optimal, but again this is a matter of degree so others may prefer a little more or less.
> Yes, over-use of vendor prefixes in CSS and other browser-specific features is bad. But that's an authoring issue as much as it's a WebKit issue. Having -moz-, -o-, and -webkit-* plus JavaScript shims to hide the differences in multiple browsers is a great argument for standards, but not a great argument for a larger variety of independently developed and maintained web rendering engines.
Agreed, this is not just a WebKit monoculture issue - plenty of other problems in that area as well, as you say.
Yes, over-use of vendor prefixes in CSS and other browser-specific features is bad. But that's an authoring issue as much as it's a WebKit issue. Having -moz-, -o-, and -webkit-* plus JavaScript shims to hide the differences in multiple browsers is a great argument for standards, but not a great argument for a larger variety of independently developed and maintained web rendering engines.