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> There are basically three rendering engines right now Genially curious, which ones? I only know two: 1) khtml based - Chrome/Edge/Safari 2) Gecko based - Fi

by betaby 3y ago

> There are basically three rendering engines right now Genially curious, which ones? I only know two: 1) khtml based - Chrome/Edge/Safari 2) Gecko based - Firefox Third would be Servo? Any browser uses it?

meatmanek 3y ago
I think they're counting Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome) as two separate engines. Given that it's been 10 years since Blink forked from Webkit, I think that's fair.
- MBCook 3y ago
  I was. Things have shifted enough (it’s been 10 years? Wow!) I think it’s fair to consider them separate. They also use completely different JS backends.
- captn3m0 3y ago
  Blink was 10 years ago! I feel old suddenly.
int_19h 3y ago
Lumping WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome/Edge/...) together stopped being meaningful quite a long time ago.
jlokier 3y ago
Chrome and Edge use the Blink rendering engine (except on iOS). Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko. (Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.) Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago. Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours. So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko. All browsers in wide use today use one of those three. On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top. It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision. This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.
- MBCook 3y ago
  I thought EdgeHTML was a clean sheet. I know they had a way to continue to run the old Trident engine under the hood for compatibility, but I didn’t think EdgeHTML was based on it. Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.
btown 3y ago
AFAIK Servo's very much active but not yet incorporated into a full-featured browser. You can try it out in a bare-bones browser at https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ - and https://servo.org/blog/2023/12/18/this-year-in-servo/ https://servo.org/blog/2023/12/18/this-year-in-servo/ has a lot more detail about the status of the project. https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2321-embedding-servo-in-rust-projects/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2321-embe... will be trying to help the community have a better answer to this question!
- MBCook 3y ago
  Oh people are still working on it? I know FF wasn’t working on it anymore but I had thought development was basically stopped completely. It’s good to hear it’s still moving forward.
  - btown 3y ago
    Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor being-fired-from-Mozilla can stop Rust hackers from being Rust hackers :)

by betaby 3y ago

meatmanek 3y ago

I think they're counting Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome) as two separate engines. Given that it's been 10 years since Blink forked from Webkit, I think that's fair.

MBCook 3y ago
I was. Things have shifted enough (it’s been 10 years? Wow!) I think it’s fair to consider them separate. They also use completely different JS backends.
captn3m0 3y ago
Blink was 10 years ago! I feel old suddenly.

int_19h 3y ago

Lumping WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome/Edge/...) together stopped being meaningful quite a long time ago.

jlokier 3y ago

Chrome and Edge use the Blink rendering engine (except on iOS). Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko. (Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.) Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago. Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours. So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko. All browsers in wide use today use one of those three. On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top. It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision. This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.

MBCook 3y ago
I thought EdgeHTML was a clean sheet. I know they had a way to continue to run the old Trident engine under the hood for compatibility, but I didn’t think EdgeHTML was based on it. Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.

btown 3y ago

AFAIK Servo's very much active but not yet incorporated into a full-featured browser. You can try it out in a bare-bones browser at https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ - and https://servo.org/blog/2023/12/18/this-year-in-servo/ https://servo.org/blog/2023/12/18/this-year-in-servo/ has a lot more detail about the status of the project. https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2321-embedding-servo-in-rust-projects/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2321-embe... will be trying to help the community have a better answer to this question!

MBCook 3y ago
Oh people are still working on it? I know FF wasn’t working on it anymore but I had thought development was basically stopped completely. It’s good to hear it’s still moving forward.
- btown 3y ago
  Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor being-fired-from-Mozilla can stop Rust hackers from being Rust hackers :)