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Comment by bbernoulli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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