[diegof79]

According to the book “Creative Selection” (by one of the original Safari devs). They tried with Gecko first, but the POC didn’t went far: the build system at that time was messy and they couldn’t get it work. So they switched to KHTML, because of the nice code base. That internal fork evolved to WebKit.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I remember peeking around the Gecko codebase when Firefox got popular - and yeah, it was pretty gnarly. I remember seeing related .cpp files in the same directory using different naming conventions, for example.

I’m told Gecko is a lot better now though.