Man I really liked pointing out that IE was the only major browser that didn't work on every major OS. Apple just lost what little high ground they had left in my book.
I always see Safari as a small GUI around vanilla WebKit -- i.e. Safari basically is WebKit. (Chrome on the other side has pushed it much further and WebKit seems to be only a part of it.)
From the history of WebKit, I also got the feeling that Apple did one of the most important work to modernize it to compete with IE, Firefox, Opera at the time it was released. Afaik, KHTML was not really as far.
Under this view, I don't really see your point. This work by Apple (WebKit/Safari) and by KDE is now part/base of one of the most important browsers, Chrome.
How does that even make sense? Apple was never even in a "browser war" to begin with, but even if you want to claim they've "lost" some sort of war, how does that lead to discontinuing their browsers? Besides the fact that Apple created WebKit and ship it as a core component of OS X, how does reducing browser choice benefit anyone?
And KHTML was based on the KDE HTML Widget. There's always prior work. But that's not particularly relevant to my point that it makes absolutely zero sense for Apple to discontinue their browser.
Really? Without Apple, "WebKit" would literally not exist. Apple created the project. The code itself was a fork of KHTML, but I'm not talking about the code, I'm talking about the project.
Created is a very strong word to toss around especially in this context. Perhaps you were only referring to the trademark WebKit which Apple did register (but they did offered to have the community manage it at the start if I recall). WebKit literally wouldn't exists without the KHTML developers who were in discussions with Apple and the result of which was the WebKit project. Here on HN where code is first class and many others have incorrectly stated that Apple coded/created/built all of WebKit and they knew nothing of KHTML it is really no surprise that someone would try to correct you when you stated the "Apple created WebKit". Creating something isn't the guy that happen to register the trademark, it is the guys that wrote the code in this context.
Who cares about the trademark? The WebKit project is what I'm talking about. KHTML would not have gone on to become an incredibly popular cross-platform, cross-device, cross-company framework for web rendering if Apple hadn't started the WebKit project. It would have remained nothing more than a web rendering engine for KDE.
Code may be important, but it's not the only thing that matters. You could write the most beautiful, efficient, useful code in the world and it wouldn't matter if nobody ever saw it.
Besides, this is straying further and further from the point that Apple ships and maintains a web rendering engine as a core component of the system. It's so firmly embedded that it actually powers most text rendering on iOS. In light of this, saying Apple should discontinue their browser which is built upon this engine is preposterous.
