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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

If you’re on MacOS, also consider Safari.

The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google.

I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"?

Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from source, giving you a functional browser.

I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have proprietary code on top of the open-source former.

Blink is to Chromium/Chrome as Webkit is to Safari

Webkit and blink are browser engines and Chromium/Chrome are both browsers, but Chromium doesn't include the closed source pieces that Chrome does.

> Webkit and blink are browser engines

Petty sure Webkit is also a browser you can build and run, like Chromium.

No, WebKit is an engine. It ships with small demo browsers for some platforms (minibrowser for gtk, at least) but that's it.

You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.

> You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.

Probably that, yes.

"Safari" is a proprietary browser that uses WebKit, which is open source. Safari Technology Preview (purple Safari) and WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods. Oh, and MiniBrowser works on macOS as well.

> WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods

yes, that's exactly what I said

You seemed to conflate Safari Technology Preview with the WebKit nightlies, when they are in fact different things and structured differently and used for different things (the former acts much more like a "standalone Safari" than does the latter, which is essentially just the WebKit frameworks loaded in to your existing Safari).

Chromium is a pretty functional browser in and of itself; WebKit does not ship with this. Pretty much all of Safari's UI is not open source.

> Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

No. WebKit (the browser engine that Safari uses) is open but the browser UI is not.

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