I find it hilarious that all of a sudden, now that Webkit is in the limelight as the leader of the Acid3 tests (and therefore the most compliant to modern web standards), you see the Slashdottians and Diggers complaining about how Acid3 isn’t a “realistic” test, and that web standards “don’t really matter” as long as they get their widgets and their extensions.
Ummm, hello? Replace the words “Webkit” and “Firefox” with “Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox” and “Internet Explorer 4/5/6” and you have exactly the kinds of arguments you would have heard half a decade ago arguing in favor of IE over the then-upstart Firefox. The biggest reason why people were trumpeting Firefox over IE was because it was standards compliant, at the cost of a lack of support for Microsoft’s proprietary features (scrolling marquee anyone?). Since only Firefox uses Firefox extensions despite its open architecture, those extensions are no better than the cheesy scrolling marquee (admittedly far more useful…Mmmm, Firebug).
There is room for an alternative. The fact that a large percentage of Mac users use Safari or it’s nightly built Webkit cousin shows that at least in one platform, it is actively gaining ground against Firefox. (On a unrelated note, I find it odd that it is both the very very new and the very very experienced who are using Safari/Webkit, with the majority of the somewhat computer literate using Firefox on Mac…Hmmm.). And you don’t even want to compare Webkit’s share of the mobile market.
