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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

> But all of them are safari core, Apple does not allow other browser runtimes, they're only the custom UI around the webview. [1]

You’re mixing up Safari and WebKit. This gives a misleading impression. Safari is Apple’s web browser. WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine. There’s much more to a browser than its rendering engine. Apple requires browsers to use WebKit, not Safari. Everything else – add-ons, syncing, UI, homepage, etc. – can be completely custom.

I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a developer working on a browser for iOS and everybody treated all of my hard work as if it were nothing. Alternative browsers aren’t just reskinned Safari. They are entire applications of their own.

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In this context they're more or less the same, because the relevant networking / adblocking bits are in webkit, AIUI.

It's true that safari and webkit are not the same, this comment is imprecise. But switching browsers won't net you different adblocking capability due to the restriction to use apples webkit core.

Edit: that is "safari core" is a very lazy shorthand for the webkit framework here. The impact to the user is pretty much the same in this context.

> switching browsers won't net you different adblocking capability due to the restriction to use apples webkit core.

That depends on what you mean by “different adblocking capability”. It’s absolutely possible for alternative browsers to block different things to Safari. I can think of three ways to do it off the top of my head: add a content rule list; inject JavaScript to remove elements from the DOM; inject CSS to hide elements.

Do you know if any browsers are doing this?

In practice on iOS nothing seems better than safari + the content rules for adblocking, but I admittedly didn't try every app

Shipping your own content lists seems like a tricky way to differentiate since users could install similar lists without using your browser.

aside: It also appears to just inject CSS you have to inject it via javscript now which feels a bit gross but certainly doable.

Many third party browsers actually implement their own networking bits. Firefox Mobile used to be based on Alamofire (but recently switched to NSURLSession). Chrome iOS uses the same stack as its desktop browser (Cronet). Third party browsers can implement adblocking any way they want, for example iCab 10 on iOS supports the AdBlock Plus format used by uBlock Origin.

Edit: most -> many

TIL, thank you :)

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