Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shp0ngle 1626 days ago
That's simple. Gecko is awful to embed and use independently of Firefox.

Now my question would be why not WebKit, as that is also easy to embed. There are browsers that use WebKit, just not that many.

1 comments

> Now my question would be why not WebKit, as that is also easy to embed. There are browsers that use WebKit, just not that many.

Wasn’t part of the WebKit/Blink split that Google cared about supporting non-Apple platforms and Apple didn’t want to anymore, (and the reverse on a number of Apple-priority features), and both sides purged their post-split engine codebases of the stuff they weren’t supporting, making post-split WebKit very much not suited to non-Apple platforms.

This is incorrect. Conflict was over multiprocess architecture, where Google added it as a WebKit port and Apple did a proper redesign and produced WebKit2. WebKit is still extremely portable and non-Apple platforms are first class.
I thought platform support was part of it, too, but I must have been mixing up the abandonment of non-Apple-platform Safari with the Blink/WebKit fork.
Ah, that might be it.

Quick googling (not any in-depth knowledge) tells me that WebKit is for Linux too, I cannot find out anything about Windows.