Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.
But it's not that easy. It's one thing to add a missing feature to a Ruby gem or event to jQuery, but WebKit is a much bigger beast. Most geeks can't realistically patch things in a big heap of C++ code like that...
It's about the same as when you start at a company with a large existing codebase. You're not going to get much done until you've read and understand the chunks of the code that relate to what you need to do. This spinup time is definitely bigger than the hour it can take to fix a bug in a small project that you previously had no experience with, but it's definitely within the realm of the possible.