| > Who outside of Apple is using WebKit at this point? Gnome/GTK, at least. The one bundled with Gnome (previously called Epiphany) still uses it. I was going to say Midori, but apparently it's recently-ish switched to Electron, which is understandable, but a little disappointing. There are other niche browsers using WebKitGTK, but with the loss of Midori (?) and Qt's WebKit interface its definitely got a really small presence now. > And how often do the tarballs drop? Unlike most open source projects inside Apple, WebKit is developed basically in the open, with a dedicated website at https://webkit.org/ and an SVN repo at https://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/. They also link directly to the WebKitGTK project, and provide instructions for building for/on Linux (and Windows). It's kind of a shame it's not more widely used -- I understand why most people so inclined would prefer Gecko/Firefox, but there may come a time when the only valid choices are a rendering engine backed by Google's dollars, or one by Apple's dollars. And unlike Mozilla, which is still mostly relying on Google's dollars, Apple has a vested financial interest in keeping a separate and at least adequate web stack. Edit: Worth mentioning one problem with WebKitGTK adoption in linux has been API deprecation. I haven't done any dev work with it, but I know a lot of projects just gave up after the WebKit -> WebKit2 port, and GTK itself can be a PITA. The tooling outside Darwin/OS X is more cumbersome, too. JavaScriptCore is easier to embed/better documented than SpiderMonkey, though (IMO). And it can even run headless, although getting it to build headless can be, uh, finicky... |