No. Contrary to popular belief, browsers on iOS aren’t all Safari skins. They all use WebKit, but there’s a vast amount of functionality in a web browser that isn’t handled by the rendering engine. This is one example.
Non-Safari browsers on iOS are free to use whatever address bar implementation they like. If Firefox on iOS has a crap address bar, that is 100% down to Firefox.
I know some people hate Apple for both good and bad reasons, but it's pretty wild to me people think Apple does this. I mean right out the gate that would be pretty illegal, no?
Because Apple is selling the hardware device, they can decide what software they ship on it. This is not specific to phones, it’s true of all hardware. There’s no feature to load arbitrary browsers onto a PlayStation, for example.
Not anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
Every browser you use is forced by App Store policy to run off of the system WebView, which is Safari...other features being part of the browser doesn't change being forced into using that engine.
No. It’s WebKit. Not Safari. That was the whole point of this subthread.