I think he is arguing that most browser vendors don't fix common bugs as much as they add features.

I understand that point, and agree. Just seems odd to use the news of Opera adopting WebKit as a platform for complaining about vendors not fixing WebKit bugs.

As far as I can see, Opera's adoption of WebKit can only result in more bug fixes submitted for the framework.

No, it could even mean fewer fixes, because coopetition is a delicate balance. Every man-hour you put into the common project helps your competition as much as yourself (outside competition like Mozilla and Microsoft excluded).

So if you remove some coders from the common codebase and shift them towards other parts of the browser that have more to do with your specific brand (JSC in Apple's example, V8 or cloud integration in Google's), up to a certain point you gain a net benefit - your brand develops faster and your partners invest more.

Of course, if each party acts like that, the common project gets stale - the tragedy of the commons.

From my completely unfair outsider view, it seems to me that Apple, for example, has more or less lost interest in WebKit and tries to stifle progress to defend their lackluster Safari against Chrome and MobileChrome.

Do you have specific examples of how you consider Apple to be "stifling" progress to defend Safari?

I use both Safari and Chrome (and WebKit nightlies). I vastly prefer Safari to Chrome, but their underlying use of WebKit seems quite similar.

Competition has seemed to help WebKit in the past (especially between Apple and Google). If you recall, they both contributed a new process model to WebKit (http://betanews.com/2010/04/09/the-big-change-coming-to-safa...). It could be argued that Apple's contribution in this area was more useful to users of the WebKit framework, while Google's was restricted to Chromium. That said, Google makes many great contributions too.

He does make a fair point that browsers will focus on themselves and not on fixing common bugs, so in the end benefit to WebKit will be less than anticipated by such move.

Also he does compare WebKit to oldIE, though I wonder is Gecko any better.

I was only comparing the version-spread problem of WebKit to the one we have in IE, not comparing the two browsers.

My bad. I guess Gecko isn't prolific enough to have major difference between versions/forks.