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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices.

Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?

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It’s a better way to say it. For you and me it might be better to say “WebKit renderer”. But for a non programmer, calling out the parts they wrote themselves is more reassuring, and highlights all the ways other browsers have to spy on you.

This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that we haven't forked anything.

So can you describe in a little detail on what exactly are you doing? I'm not sure if you have plans to open source the browser or not?

Yes, we plan to open source as we come out of beta. It's similar to our iOS app/browser, which is already open source here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/ios

For all practical purposes, yes.

Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.

> they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.

WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.

I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.

Because it is a standard Apple API so less work to do.

True, but I as expecting them to want to port the browser to other platforms. Well, you can use webkit on those as well, so maybe it's less work, I don't know.

WebKit is technically cross-platform, but browsers that use it only exist in Linux and Mac world. If DDG ports their browser to Windows and doesn't switch to Blink, then it will be the only well-maintained WebKit browser for Windows.

WebKit is vastly superior to Blink on Mac.

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