> it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features.
Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns.
> accelerate innovation?
Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing.
Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base, for example.
While likely true, the value of multiple UAs as opposed to a monoculture is that it increases the likelihood that a revolutionary implementation that _can_ scare well to large number of cores would be able to get any traction at all instead of just being stillborn because it doesn't duplicate all the bugs of the monoculture.
So my point wasn't that one would build such a UA by starting with Presto. My point was that there are distinct advantages to competition over everyone using the same rendering engine.
Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns.
> accelerate innovation?
Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing.
Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base, for example.