this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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I’ve reread this like 5 times and still have no clue what you’re trying to say.
The person you replied to was technically incorrect - other browsers aren’t UIs on top of Safari, but (outside the EU) they’re all limited to the same browser rendering engine Safari uses, Webkit.
This means that other rendering engines - namely Firefox’s Gecko and Chromium’s Blink, as well as niche engines like Ladybird’s - are unavailable there (outside the EU).
This is not generally true of browsers on iOS, and might not be true of any.
I didn’t know what this was at first - apparently this was a typo for “Falkon.”
The browser rendering engine used by Chromium browsers is Blink, which was forked from Webkit over a decade ago, but I’m not aware of any non-Chromium browsers that use it… including Falkon, which appears to leverage QtWebEngine, which itself uses Chromium.
By “based on” do you mean “uses the same branding as and is loosely inspired by?” Because I highly doubt that the iOS codebase is based off the desktop codebase for many Chromium or Firefox-based browsers… they may share some code and assets but I doubt they get to share much more than that.
Ecosia for sure and Qwant and Brave AFAIK too are forks of Firefox. They all use WebKit as an engine but the rest of the browser is derived from Firefox. Falkon vs Edge was a bad example (wrong), these browsers are more like Floorp. I wasn’t saying that this is generally true for IOS browsers, just that a pretty large part of FOSS ones are
Cool, didn’t know that about Ecosia.
Qwant: looks like maybe they used to have a browser that might have been forked from Firefox, but it hasn’t been updated in a while - per the App Store listings, I think they now just have a lightweight search engine frontend.
Brave on iOS appears to have been forked from Firefox on iOS back in 2018-2019, which was news to me. (“Appears to” regards the date; it was definitely forked from Firefox).
This might be true for some, like Ecosia, but I’m guessing that Brave isn’t pulling changes from Firefox. It seems like they basically used the Firefox codebase as a starting point - and in 5 years of development, a lot can change.
Gotcha, that makes more sense.
One more thing to point out is that your comment reads like they were based on Firefox and that Firefox didn’t use Webkit (but of course Firefox on iOS also uses Webkit).
Meaning that they’re forks of Chromium on desktop in the same way Floorp is a fork of Firefox on desktop?