Slavo wrote in to let me know that Apple's Safari is built on KHTML and KJS and NOT the Mozilla code base.

Here are some sources: http://tinyurl.com/48gm and http://tinyurl.com/48gn

So, it seems that Safari is built on KDE/Qt's Konqueror web browser rather than Gecko!

Very interesting information, indeed.  I guess my initial thoughts about the new minimalist movement in browsing may be correct - now that everyone's browser is a minimalist (and standard's complient) one, we can't assume that choices for the underlying engine is only IE or Gecko.

One thing I think all this does tell me though, is that there is no reason a browser has to be bloat-ware.  I was talking with Scott from 3Leaf  (He's "Adopter" of Early and Adopter) and he's started running Phoenix.  He revelled in the fact that there's no setup involved.  No shell script, no wise, no installshield, no MSI.  Just run phoenix.exe and it RUNS.  Amazing.