Mozilla, Like Google, is Looking Ahead To the End of Apple's WebKit Rule

'Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. From a report: Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store. As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS. The major browser makers -- Apple, Google, and Mozilla -- each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple's Safari is based on WebKit; Google's Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla's Firefox is based on Gecko. Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/07/1733204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 13:39:40 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
' As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS. The major browser makers -- Apple, Google, and Mozilla -- each have their own browser rendering engines.'
About blooming time. I have seen several online laments as to the poor state of Apple’s IOS Safari engine in supporting the latest Web standards. (The Mac version of Safari seems to be just as bad, but I don’t think anybody cares about that any more.) I’m no Web developer expert, but here’s one small example of something I was looking at lately <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OffscreenCanvas>. Look at the compatibility matrix: note that there is not a single green entry under either of Apple’s browsers, while everybody else offers some support.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann