There had been discord between Apple and the Open Source community over their joint but forking efforts to advance the KHTML rending engine behind such browsers as Konqueror and Safari, but that’s all over now. Along with the recent announcement that Apple was going to Intel for chips, comes news that Apple has reformed their Open Source efforts and released the Webkit Open Source project aimed at improving collaboration and sharing on the browser technology.
This is more important to the web developers than it might seem. Right now there is a general perception that there are only two real browser technologies to develop for, Internet Explorer and Firefox/Netscape Mozilla GECKO. It is important to remember Opera and the KHTML browsers as well as several smaller players as well. Market share isn’t really a good reason to develop for only a limited number of browsers because as Firefox has proven recently, market share is unpredictable and can change at the drop of a hat. We as developers want to follow Sun’s Java mantra of “Write once run everywhere” where the use of open W3C standards means that all browsers can correctly render the page in question. For that to become reality developers need to start following the standards rather then coding for a particular browser and Internet Explorer needs all of it’s rendering bugs fixed. If Konqueror and Safari succeed in aligning their code base and standards support, they could together grow to encompass a significant part of the browser landscape and ensure that developers become aware that the only way to write web pages is by the standards rather then by the browser.
