Yea, that'd also be like saying Edge and Brave aren't browsers either. They're just skins on top of Chrome. The browser is way more than its rendering engine.
Both Edge and Brave make deeper changes than are allowed on iOS, such as making their own decisions about which APIs to expose. Yes, they are mostly Chromium, but they are in a technical position to change anything they want in a way Apple prohibits.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Chrome and Safari; Chrome and Edge all use or used the same rendering engine (on one platform or another) for years, but you would never say you’re using one or the other when you don’t.
Similarly if my Chevy has the exact same engine as a model of Dodge I would never say I’m driving a Dodge.
I don't see how this means that Firefox without Gecko isn't a browser. I can see how you might take issue with calling it Firefox, but it's clearly a browser that's in the app store.
I could see both sides, but ultimately I use Firefox as an attempt to try and keep chromium's monopoly as a web renderer at bay, even if for seconds longer. Firefox on IOS being forced to basically be built on top of a chromium engine defeats that purpose.
It's for similar reasons that I don't recognize "Visual Studio for Mac" as VS, but a rebranded Xamarin. It lacks several core features of VS that devs hearing the name would expect (let alone hundreds of more specialized features).
The browser is the whole thing. All of it. If you can't replace the rendering engine then you can't replace the browser. Not only because you can't replace the rendering engine but because many of the other things depend on the ability to add features to the rendering engine.
If you put a Dodge engine in a Chevy, you don't call it a Dodge, you call it a Frankenstein's monster which isn't either one and both Dodge and Chevy fans (but especially Chevy fans) will think less of you for it.
I don't see your point. The topic in question is browsers in the App Store. The suggestion was made that these aren't real "browsers" because they use the Safari rendering engine.
If a Telsa with a Honda engine is a car, why isn't Firefox with WebKit (which is what Safari uses) as it's rendering engine a browser?
You could argue it's not "real" Firefox, and I might see where your coming from, but my comment was specifically addressing the claim it's not a browser.
Pretty sure "there are no browsers in the app store" was not meant to be taken literally, it's a snarky way of implying that the options are incomplete in some way (because they're "just" skins on top of the Safari rendering engines.) You're reading this overly literally, which is why people are reacting to your comments with confusion.