Competence is also a transient determination. IE6 was highly competent in its time, it is only retrospectively that it "earns" most of its incompetence. IE defined the modern CSS box layout strategy of choice (and realized that box layout model was something underdefined in the specifications), for just one instance. Most of IE6's particular incompetence was the "mic drop" peace-out of Microsoft declaring victory on web browsing and disbanding the team for far too many years; unless you are crazy, you don't "mic drop" on what you think to be an incompetent project, and there's certainly a delicious irony in being considered "too competent" becoming a major part of your core incompetency in a "mic drop" incident.

> Competence compensates for a monoculture.

Sometimes. But motivation matters. The motivation behind ghc is clearly and unequivocally to advance the Haskell ecosystem. The motivation behind Chrome's dominance is another thing entirely.

In addition, the Haskell ecosystem is only one among many programming ecosystems that we can choose among for any given task. If the Haskell ecosystem is a monoculture, and isn't headed in a direction that suits your needs, you can choose another environment.

There's (pretty much) only one Web that needs to serve us all.

Not when one of the concerns is to make it possible to maintain compatibility with it.

Microsoft threw the towel for this very reason. It is quite hard to keep up when you have an implementation used by more than 70% of the market, because that makes it the de facto standard, regardless of what the standard really is.

We are going to see the same issues as with IE6: chrome does (and breaks) things before the standards are updated, and dictate huge chuncks of poorly-thought features on the web platform, that might become required for any kind of serious business (think flash, java, silverlight, widevine).

This really is the E part in EEE (the middle one...)