WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so.<p>People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed.<p>It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations.  Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard".<p>And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins.  I still strongly believe that being tied to JavaScript as really the only client side language is a mistake.  It's not a great IL and limiting the language for such a pervasive platform is scary.  I powerful plugin model would be, IMO, one of the best things to a truly powerful web.<p>I wish the web was more open.  I wish that browsers were a truly extensible runtime that specified lower level abstractions, that allowed more innovation at the top of the stack.<p>It feels like we're walking into the dark age of the internet.