[kenferry]

You’re confusing iOS and Mac OS here.

The Mac never used WebKit for NSTextField rendering. When iOS was first written, WebKit was used as the text renderer everywhere initially, including in UIKit controls (the “sweet solution”). This proved to be too heavyweight / cumbersome and the coretext/appkit text rendering approach was brought over.

[Klonoar]

Also NSAttributedString would invoke WebKit under the hood if you went to render an HTML string.

[kenferry]

On what platform? It invoked WebKit always on iOS in the early days, html or not. On Mac, AppKit could import html to attributed strings before WebKit existed.

[cybercatgurrl]

this is the correct answer