It’s greatly encouraging in that talking to people at the Mozilla All Hands, we are still committed to driving the Gecko and Servo implementations of the web platform. #mozlando2018
This might be good time to reiterate why independent implementations, both at a high-level (e.g., browser) and low-level (e.g., text encodings) are valued and important to a healthy and thriving web platform. (And please do feel free to chime in and discuss.)
No single company should control the future of the web platform.
With a single implementation, bugs will become features much more quickly, leading to ecosystem decay. (We might still have the IE6 three pixel gap.)
Independent implementations ensure standards can be implemented from first principles and are not just a bunch of words to appease a complicit standards group.
It allows companies to experiment with radical new strategies to solve old problems better (e.g., Servo). Such a refactoring would be impossible without standards and tests.
Standards with independent implementations are vastly easier to adopt in new devices and platforms.
Software monocultures are bad for security. Almost every security bug will affect all users.
It protects against stagnation of the web platform. E.g., if the company behind it stops investing in it. (Again, see IE6.)
Independent implementations, and therefore voices, can also block bad ideas much more successfully. (E.g., PNaCl, Dart, ActiveX.)
Again, I welcome your thoughts. Many thanks to @stpeter and @__farre__ for helping out!
