this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can't render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.
Not to toot the kagi Horn, but they are talking about releasing thier webkit based Orion Browser on Linux. Ive been following that one closely since it has firefox extension support.
I mean, if folks really want something like that, I'd say they shouldn't have let KDE's KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die. But as I've said elsewhere in this thread, KHTML→WebKit→Blink are related and thus fail to combat Google's web hegemony the way that Gecko (Firefox) does.
I've become very skeptical of anything Kagi, wishing they'd just focused on making one thing good instead of getting distracted by mediocre AI and a browser they can't realistically support while their search is still subpar. Illusions of grandeur.
Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product
Subpar Search?
Yeah, wtf is he/she talking about there :)
What about Apple's WebKit? Does it count?
You mean KHMTL, born in KDE's Konqueror. That spawned WebKit (Safari), that spawned Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc). The whole thing then finally came full-circle when Konqueror dropped KHTML due to lack of development, now you have the choice between WebKit and Blink (via Qt WebEngine).
Then there's Gecko (Firefox) and Servo which had a near-death experience after Mozilla integrated half of it into Gecko but by now development is alive and kicking again. Oh and then there's lynx, using libwww, tracing its lineage back straight to Tim Berners Lee.
No, they don't mean KHTML. KHTML is an ancestor of WebKit and Blink, but WebKit forked from it over 2 decades ago. They meant WebKit.
They also didn't mean lynx and yet I mentioned it. How come? Might the distinct possibility exist that I used the opportunity to draw a wider picture, and "you mean X" has to be understood as internet brain-rot rhetorics, not literally?
Just a suggestion.
Nope, it doesn't count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I'm sure they've diverged enough for it to be pretty significant compared to the Chromium browsers
They've been separate for over a decade, and even before that they were heavily customizing it. They're cousins, but absolutely not close enough at this point to be considered the same.
So it wasn’t, like, forked hard enough that now after the years it counts as a different browser? Expect it to render pages ‘n’ stuff pretty much like Chrome?
I admit, I haven't really looked into it. It's possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it's also possible that Apple continued to backport Google's changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they'd do mostly the latter, but you'd have to go read the code to know for sure.
They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.
haha Safari would like a word.
What word? I spoke the truth: there are only two rendering engines. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn't considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I deleted my original comment before you replied because I am not really in the mood to defend this but the OP was talking about the pain of developing for different browsers and I don't care what is a fork of what, this is a fact: Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render differently and have to be catered to individually.
Also, Safari, between desktop and mobile, has 30% of the market to Firefox's 8%.
I don't LIKE it, but there are "effectively" three, not two, rendering engines.
It's about browser architecture and not silly names ("Safari", "Firefox", "Chrome"). The point is that there are only two actual variants.
Not when you have to make a web app render identically in them, which is what the OP was about.
No, you still have three rendering engines. WebKit and Blink are different. Since the second is an (old) fork of the other one, they are similar but far from being the same. They are pages that work in one but not the other, even if you change the user agent.
That's...not true at all.
And safari, although it's a cousin/uncle to Chrome at this point.
Not that I use it, but still.