Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Since I already got sniped from Zawodny for hitting him on his linkblog one liners, lets point to Gruber this time:

WebKit Now Supports CSS Gradients:
Just me, or is WebKit racing way ahead of Gecko in terms of support for cool new stuff?

I think this is horribly misstating where these two projects are. I fumbled around for it for a bit but can't find it, so I will paraphrase someone else (let me know if you know who this was): Yes, WebKit is the belle of the ball right now. It sees adoption from Google, Sun, and Apple because it has a tighter codebase. Part of that, though, is because it is simply a younger project. In terms of Web rendering engines, this is a "Fifth System" effect. What I do think this is missing, though, is that while Gecko might be taking a "strategic pause" in hitting the new features lists, they are spending a whole ton of time getting back to basics and house cleaning. With huge results. FF3b5 today is markedly faster, leaner, meaner and generally badassier than almost anything I have seen yet.

FF2 was a total pile of crap. Anyone who really used it will tell you that. But the moz folks are certainly not taking it lying down. RAM use is WAY down(although, experimental results with my Intel Mac vs a friends G4 Mac show the G4 version, not so much) JavaScript is faster, and they are making a full court press to be back at the top of the raw numbers. I expect FF3.5 to be back in the running on features too.

The short version: Gecko isn't going to be MSIE and take a 10 year nap while everyone else runs circles around it. Sure, the code inertia and bitrot got bad for a while there, but they seem to be on top of it. FF3b4 became my default browser, and I expect 3.0 to be a monumental release.