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Comment by elashri

4 years ago

> 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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elashri

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gumby  4 years ago

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.

yegg  4 years ago

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.

sholladay  4 years ago

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.

  • jorams  4 years ago

    > 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.

mrweasel  4 years ago

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.