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"Best" Mac browser: Your view
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn't really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.
I'm glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don't always do what's right for the web... but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.
What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don't provide any of that.
Sure, let me know if I'm following this train of thought by drawing a parallel.
If we swapped out rendering engine with game engines. It would be best if we kept to a few game engines and focused on the game mechanics and story?
In that spirit, I would agree with you. Much like the examples you provided, its more about who or what controls the full stack of experience. It's just, quickly thinking about this I'm struggling to find a compelling reason to use a browser beyond the basics. Since the core features I seem to require are satisfied in any browser that isn't provided by an entity that puts capital interests before the user too harshly. Plus the addition of an adblocker and custom theming.
Ultimately, it just needs to show the webpage safely and precisely how it was intended to be seen, without ads. Through the support of extensions, I suspect that would satisfy any additional requirement someone could desire or imagine without the need to delve much deeper into custom browsers. At least, a browser for general use without a specific purpose. But perhaps I'm misjudging the capacity of those potential extensions in the face of a customized browser?
I suspect, how opera paints a bunch of features down the left side may be hard to replicate on another?
Game engines are a lot simpler than a web rendering engine, so I'm not sure it's a good comparison.
Gecko (the FireFox rendering engine) dates back to 1997. And KHTML — the common ancestor shared by Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) is maybe one or two years younger - I wasn't able to find a source. An insane amount of work, by millions of people if you include minor contributes, has gone into those rendering engines.
Creating another one would be an insane amount of work... assuming you want it to be competitive.