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by kaba0 1098 days ago
I believe Harfbuzz is used almost universally by every major application from Chrome to Firefox.
2 comments

Harfbuzz only provides 'text shaping' (very important for UNICODE support, especially for languages like Arabic), but the actual text rendering needs to be done elsewhere.
Their rendering engines choose the OS native one. They have abstractions over that. For example they'll use DirectWrite on Windows. Implementing a partial GUI toolkit is just another thing in the list of extremely hard problems in browser engine development.