If it were GPL (without an explicit exception), they wouldn't have been able to embed it in Safari, without distributing Safari under GPL or something compatible with GPL.

KHTML was also pretty sweet already, before WebKit was born, but it lacked the polish ... e.g. web pages weren't rendering properly because KHTML was adhering to standards, whereas Mozilla was adding IExplorer features to make web pages look nice (remember, this was back when "works best in IExplorer" was still the norm). Fortunately for all of us, Mozilla decided against implementing ActiveX (it's a pity that people don't remember these things when speaking of PNaCl or Dart).

Unfortunately, WebKit has become in a lot of ways the new IExplorer on mobiles (at least this time it's driven by standards and it's open-source). I hope Mozilla can bring some balance.

> Unfortunately, WebKit has become in a lot of ways the new IExplorer on mobiles (at least this time it's driven by standards and it's open-source).

Except this is talk about standards and open-source is rubbish, because each mobile device has a different version of Webkit and users only have the version that came with the device.