My pal Neven added some smart thoughts to my earlier bit about WebKit on mobile. I think he’s mostly right.

Mozilla has been dragging its feet when it comes to adding next-gen rendering features (the sort that may some day make Flash unnecessary), focusing instead on everything above the Gecko engine. They are also woefully unprepared to match, let alone exceed, WebKit’s embedded performance.

You could argue that Firefox is a better browser (if you love its extensions and location bar) but the engine is falling behind badly. Both users and developers stand to gain more by focusing on the engine that works great now and looks to have a bright future than by arguing hypotheticals.

I’ll admit I’m an informed but casual follower of the nuances of browser rendering engines, but I think it’s unfair to say that Gecko is falling behind, certainly not badly. Gecko has native support for HTML 5 proposals like video and audio tags. It supports anything you could want to do with CSS. The Javascript engine actually took a rather novel approach to improve performance pretty dramatically.

The albatross around Gecko’s neck is that it’s a pain for developers – application developers, not web developers – to embed it in their own apps, owing largely, as I understand it, to XUL. This is doubly so in the mobile space I would imagine, where WebKit’s portability is a huge boon. But that’s a developer issue, not an end-user or even web developer issue, Gecko itself has admirably kept up with the changing tides and made some waves of its own.

I am reasonably sure that development of WebKit is fueled by the desire to do amazing things using web technologies, and not by an urge to compete with anyone; as far as I can tell, the WebKit team isn’t paying too much attention to what Mozilla is up to.

Put another way, even if Firefox, IE, and Opera halted development today and added no new features, Apple and others on the WebKit team would be working their butts off to make the web richer - because they want it for themselves.

This is where I couldn’t agree more. I think Apple and Google, the two biggest contributors to WebKit, would continue to push WebKit forward even if Safari and Chrome were the only two browsers on earth. Those two companies have proven, for the most part, that they are driven to continue to do better, even when they’re already the best at what they do.

Maybe the world would be a better place if there were one agreed upon engine that was open source, rapidly developed and did what it was told. I doubt it since that’s not even the case for WebKit now so until then, I’ll keep rooting for Gecko to succeed.