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by ur--whale 2560 days ago
The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google.

I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"?

Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?
2 comments
latexr 2560 days ago
Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from source, giving you a functional browser.

I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have proprietary code on top of the open-source former.

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bbernoulli 2560 days ago
Blink is to Chromium/Chrome as Webkit is to Safari

Webkit and blink are browser engines and Chromium/Chrome are both browsers, but Chromium doesn't include the closed source pieces that Chrome does.

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latexr 2560 days ago
> Webkit and blink are browser engines

Petty sure Webkit is also a browser you can build and run, like Chromium.

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floatboth 2560 days ago
No, WebKit is an engine. It ships with small demo browsers for some platforms (minibrowser for gtk, at least) but that's it.

You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.

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saagarjha 2560 days ago
"Safari" is a proprietary browser that uses WebKit, which is open source. Safari Technology Preview (purple Safari) and WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods. Oh, and MiniBrowser works on macOS as well.
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floatboth 2560 days ago
> WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods

yes, that's exactly what I said

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latexr 2560 days ago
> You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.

Probably that, yes.

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saagarjha 2560 days ago
Chromium is a pretty functional browser in and of itself; WebKit does not ship with this. Pretty much all of Safari's UI is not open source.
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saagarjha 2560 days ago
> Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

No. WebKit (the browser engine that Safari uses) is open but the browser UI is not.

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