I'd save my biggest thanks to the guys who turned the cute little KHTML library into a seriously modern and scalable engine. Not only do their combined efforts power a full quarter of the desktop market, but probably something like 95% of the modern smartphone market.
Anyone who's ever had to develop for the shitty custom browsers written by LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens (etc etc etc) knows what I mean.
Nokia is often cited as a big contributor because they bought TrollTech. Much of Nokia's own work on WebKit for the S60 never got merged back into the mainline.
Similarly, RIM's contributions were actually Torch Mobile, who they acquired less than two years ago. Torch employed several long-time KHTML and WebKit contributors.
Google are (I believe) the biggest single contributor today, but their contributions aren't yet substantial overall.
Apple's contributions included extensive work on standards compliance, web compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and butt loads of major features. You know, the important bits.
Not this again, we were just over this a few days ago [1]. And even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit (which is beyond absurd)... what is your point?
Apple has a WebKit browser. They ship it. They shove it down your throat if you're an iTunes user... and yet it has pathetic share. It had a huge head start on Chrome and it's bundled with the OS on laptops that have exploded in the last few years. Yet Chrome beats it.
Chrome iterates faster. Chrome has forced others to up their anty. Chrome has a better auto-update model and a better, richer extension model and ecosystem.
So if we're being thankful of browser vendors for really pushing the web forward, even if we pretended that WebKit was all Apple's... it still doesn't make sense to be so snooty about thanking Apple.
"even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit"
Straw man. Nobody said that. Nobody implied that.
"So if we're being thankful of browser vendors"
I wasn't been thankful of browser vendors. If I was, I'd be thankful to Google for Chrome. In fact I'm being thankful for WebKit which freed the world from a long tail of shitty in-house mobile browsers.
I don't want to be misconstrued as an Apple fanboy, but surely credit should be due when it's due. Apple (through David Hyatt and others) took a ghettoized library and turned it into a cross-platform, cross-ecosystem, cross-device library so good that companies like Google and Nokia can't help but contribute massively.
No question Chrome is the superior implementation of WebKit on the desktop. Chrome iterates faster, but it's iteration on the back of giants.
Similarly the KHTML team deserves recognition, but even they will admit their plans didn't go beyond the KDE ecosystem.
I'd start with thanking Mozilla, since if they didn't create the potential for a vendor-neutral web then Safari and the iPhone's compatability issues (which were already substantial, since they actually followed standards) would have been insurmountable and the hegemony of IE6 would have continued to this day (and incidentally prevented Apple's resurgence which was partly built on iPods, but partly built on having a semi-compatible version of IE and Office, then Safari after IE got killed.)
Anyone who's ever had to develop for the shitty custom browsers written by LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens (etc etc etc) knows what I mean.
So yeah, thanks Apple.