Safari is both usable for everyday users and is used every day by more than those that use Firefox, which means WebKit is a viable alternative to Blink.
I guess this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf? Or maybe not?
It's not clear, either, what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.
Overall, this comment is very confusing.
Yes, sorry, I meant http://www.netsurf-browser.org/. (I knew I should look up and put in the link, but it was late... Turns out I even misremembered the name.)
> what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.
That the Blink layout engine is a fork of the WebKit codebase, so if the issue is keeping the standard healthy by ensuring multiple people can implement it independently, having WebKit and Blink be the only implementations is less than ideal, even if not a complete failure.
I wish there was a more Firefoxy WebKit browser out there, I'm not going back to a web without Ublock.
I wouldn’t say that of GNOME Web.
> I'm not going back to a web without Ublock
I do every day (switching between luakit on a laptop and firefox-mobile-config on a smartphone), and IMO a good /etc/hosts is good enough (edit: luakit can also read the same blocklist format as µBlock, though it ignores cosmetic filters).
I wouldn't say it was really hostility. But Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place. And they have millions of things to catch up at the time they ultimately decided they could only focus on a few things like Quantum and other things in Project Snappy. May be in the future.
Compared to Webkit the whole engine was designed as an embeddable engine from Day one.
This is untrue in the starkest sense. Please don't make stuff up and then present it as fact.
Embeddability was a major goal for Gecko at the outset. It's the reason for many of the architectural decisions that exist today (past the point where that goal has been abandoned).
The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.