In “There is no WebKit on Mobile”, Peter-Paul Koch does the grunt work to prove what I’ve been telling people for the last year: WebKit, as much as I love it, is a mess as a “platform”. The problem is particularly acute on mobile devices because very few of them provide over-the-air updates for their bundled software. Honestly, the desktop situation is rather messy too. There’s no quick or even ideal fix for the issues described here, this is the state “WebKit” is going to be in for some time.

There’s some interesting 3rd-party vendor extensions to WebKit, such as Palm’s vendor prefix of -webkit-palm-* or the variance in JavaScript engines (Chrome vs. Safari), that will have to see how the ecosystem handles the rapid growth and potential incompatibilities.