Stop talking about 'reskinned safari' please. This is not how it works. It is not what those alternative browsers currently are. You make it sound like we just change the color of the bezel. There are huge amounts of code around the WKWebView, which is the only thing common between browsers.
Servo for example cannot come to iOS because of Apple's restrictions. It doesn't matter that YOU are fine with WebKit, some of us want to see dfferent rendering engines seeing how they're kind of core to the whole browser. WebKit is slowly but surely becoming another IE, something I think we can all agree would be a bad thing.
Edit: The following comment is incorrect. I checked the guidelines and they've actually revised it to explicitly say you have to use WebKit for apps that browse the web.
> Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript
Original comment:
AIUI the only real restriction here is against executing downloaded code, but you should be able to still write your own competing engine as long as you use JavaScriptCore to execute JS. That said, you can't do out-of-process execution or JIT compilation, so your engine won't be as fast as WKWebView, which means it won't be competitive and so there's not much reason to go through all the effort of making a new iOS browsing engine if users aren't going to want to use it.
My counterpoint is that with better, more open, APIs in WKWebview we would be able extend the current engine with new, unique, functionality. I would be happy with that as a start.
