On Daring Fireball this morning, there was a link to Matt Asay’s CNET feature Google and Apple should join the Firefox party, which in a nutshell suggests Google and Apple should ditch WebKit and instead ‘invest in Firefox’. As someone immersed in the web design industry for much of my life, whether it’s in designing sites or writing about the process of designing sites, Asay’s suggestion made my head spin. Here are some reasons why he’s wrong:

Consolidation reduces software innovation

We see this everywhere, and notably in the creative industry. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it removed the bulk of its competition. Since then, it’s grown fat and lazy. This would likely happen if it was IE vs Frankenstein’s Monster Firefox.

All the competition has rising market share

Asay’s main argument for consolidation is that it’d smack Microsoft hard. He claims splintering efforts is less effective than a solidified counter attack. That must be news to Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox, each of which continues to chip away at Microsoft’s lead. Sure, it’s a slow process, but it is steady, and I haven’t seen too many ‘IE market share rises by five per cent’ headlines of late.

WebKit is often superior to Gecko

Firefox and its Gecko engine might be the runner-up to IE, but WebKit is smaller, sleeker and more efficient. If Apple knifed Safari, the Gecko equivalent would be more bloated and unsuitable for iPhone.

Ownership enables optimisation for own services

Google didn’t make a browser because they thought it’d be a fun jape—Chrome exists to be a solid runtime environment for Google’s online apps. Similarly, Safari is a browser but its core is a major component of Mac OS X and iPhone, accessible to developers. Ditching these components would be a crazy decision by either company, just to try and batter Microsoft’s market lead in an area that Apple and Google are only superficially interested in anyway.

IE’s competition is compliant and fast to react

The main concern from a design industry standpoint is standards compliance. When building a typical website, you can be reasonably sure that whatever you do will work fine in Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Google. It’s IE that’s the problem.

Asay argues that “common investment in Firefox […] would leave the industry better off”, but I’d say precisely the opposite is true. It would shackle Google and Apple’s development, leave Opera out in the cold (unless they too threw in their lot with Firefox, thereby obliterating their entire organisation in a single moment of madness), and provide no benefits to the end user.

That all said, there is one argument I’ll make for consolidation: I’d like to see IE9 bin the Trident engine and Microsoft base its browser around Gecko, WebKit or Presto. That way, IE’s odd quirks would be consigned to history, we’d have three competing but excellent rendering engines, and Microsoft could get on with providing a decent Windows-like interface for its users to access the web with. And for all those sites that would explode should that happen, just retain the irksome ‘compatibility mode’ for a couple of versions of IE, but make it a literal ‘engine switch’ to the last version of Trident.