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somethingor

> every other browser

You can just say Chromium

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Safari exists, and is quite popular.

Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.

Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year. I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?

Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.

Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?

I thought that electron == chrome

...is there a better reason to like webkit? Chromium certainly doesn't make effort to seem appealing to developers outside of its association with WebKit.

Since when? I don't see any mention on the blog, and the FAQ still says they're not targeting anything other than MacOS. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support

It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073

I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)

This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.

Not sure how this contradicts the fact that Safari is quite popular.

Going purely by (mis)feature count, I'd say they're pretty similar:

https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...

Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).

To me, chromium only matters so much as I am forced to care by being employed. It offers very little to me outside of being necessary to enable the "blur" background on my video chats and offers a very shitty corporate UX.

you can blur the background now at OS level on macOS from the menu bar.

However, WebKit exists elsewhere.

On mobile, I somewhat like Sleipnir browser for various configurable UI niceties unrelated to WebKit. I like the way it displays tabs as a scrolling strip of buttons, instead of making me open a "manage tabs" UI.

I configured a different user-agent string[1] to make some sites happy or to get some sites to neither force a dumbed-down "mobile view" nor spam demands that I use their mobile apps.

It has a small selection of plugins/extensions, mostly written by users.

Occasionally, a captcha will get stuck in a loop, so I'll have to try Opera[2] or Firefox. Or a Google site will sometimes refuse logins.

. o O ( I don't bother with Sleipnir on desktop, because it's buggy, quixotic, and nothing like the mobile version. )

[1] There's an optional UI button for switching UA string among Sleipnir's desktop or mobile ones, or your own custom string.

[2] The only mobile browser I've tried that can always convince a site to load is desktop view. Some Google sites try Very HardTM to force a mobile experience.

Apple devices make up over half of all visitors in some markets/segments.

Update: Downvoted for facts, stay classy, HN!

So what? For many people, having to buy new hardware to use it means it isn't a viable alternative browser.

My point was more that it's hard to ignore as a publisher due to its user base, less that it's a viable alternative as a user.

> Safari only exist on Apple devices

Webkit, at least, builds on a lot more platforms than you think. Take a look at https://build.webkit.org/#/builders

I'm seeing at least three other MAJOR platforms:

  • GTK-Linux-64-bit-Release-Build
  • PlayStation-Release-Build
  • Windows-64-bit-Release-Build

WebKit 100% exists on Windows and Linux, Microsoft builds it under the playwright project.

I use it occasionally, only for debugging purposes though.

And just a tip, if you don't have any Apple devices but need to test a bug/inconsistency being reported by Safari users, you can usually use GNOME Web (Epiphany) and the same behavior will usually manifest, since it is a true Webkit browser. It also includes the Web Inspector with the exact same interface as Safari. And it's not super outdated or anything like that, it tracks Webkit quite well nowadays.

It's a bit ironic that Webkit started as KHTML, a component of KDE, but eventually made its way to GNOME when a Gecko-based Epiphany became hard to maintain.

WebKit also exists on Linux, albeit not as good as on Darwin.

Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.

Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform.

Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

I think once Apple is forced to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome/Chromium will have won the browser wars.

At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

>At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

The only lesson Google took from the Microsoft browser monopoly was "make sure the browser doesn't suck ass". So, Chromium will continue to be technically competent, enough that they can lull people to sleep and mine their personal data in ways that should horrify us all. Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

> Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

True at the time, but spam is now baked into Windows.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )

That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.

I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.

I agree. To a large extent, the only people you'll see putting Chrome on their iPhones are the people who are cross platform on their laptops.

Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.

Google's goal is to push ads and you can see that with everything their doing. Manifest v3 castrates adblockers and their attempts to remove 3rd party cookies would stifle any competition in adtech.

The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.

That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.

Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.

Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.

Outlook is Electron slop now? Jesus christ.

It's so fantastic that it can't even open Outlook .msg files. It boggles the mind

I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.

> Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike

Yep. It was great. Now it's a kitchen sink with everything thrown into it and it's disgusting.

This has always been an issue with Gecko and the Mozilla codebase. It was a massive blow to the Mozilla community when Safari was released using KHTML instead of Gecko. Google then adopted WebKit (itself an evolution of KHTML) for Chrome, another slight for Mozilla. This despite prominent ex Mozilla developers like Lisa Melton, David Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and others being involved early on with Safari and Chrome development. Even Brendan Eich went with Chromium and not Mozilla technology for Brave.

> Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

Electron apps have no stake nor impact of any kind in the results of browser market share. None.

Indeed, shipping Chrome alongside each application, because developers couldn't be bothered to write cross-platform Web code for OS Web widgets or the users system browser doesn't have nothing to do with it.

None at all, those poor devs, write portable Web code is so hard.

In my experience, Safari has been the slowest to implement useful new standards and is the least transparent about bugs and development plans, so it's very hard to act like they're doing us a favor by preventing better and more open browsers from having more marketshare.

Welcome to open standards.

Same happens across OpenGroup, Khronos and ISO standards in the industry.

Apparently what is so great about them, is too much work in what concerns doing the latest shinny thing on the Web.

I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/

It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier to add fancy animations.

Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.

That is the generic way to implememt transitions. Alternative is playing css artist and handwrite every single animation. It is also complex.

I hate css animations too btw.

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