WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though... GP was probably referring more to efforts like WebSurf.

> efforts like WebSurf

I guess this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf? Or maybe not?

It's not clear, either, what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

Overall, this comment is very confusing.

> this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf

Yes, sorry, I meant http://www.netsurf-browser.org/. (I knew I should look up and put in the link, but it was late... Turns out I even misremembered the name.)

> what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

That the Blink layout engine is a fork of the WebKit codebase, so if the issue is keeping the standard healthy by ensuring multiple people can implement it independently, having WebKit and Blink be the only implementations is less than ideal, even if not a complete failure.

Only on Apple hardware though.

No, in fact Mozilla’s hostility to embeddability makes the world’s largest megacorp look positively selfless as a contributor to the FLOSS community: the WebKit devs actually give 2¢ about it and webkit2gtk, and it enables a whole range of cross platform (GNU/* and *BSD) browsers from GNOME Web to suckless surf to luakit.

In terms of non-Apple WebKit browsers, that's about it though. And they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience.

I wish there was a more Firefoxy WebKit browser out there, I'm not going back to a web without Ublock.

> they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience

I wouldn’t say that of GNOME Web.

> I'm not going back to a web without Ublock

I do every day (switching between luakit on a laptop and firefox-mobile-config on a smartphone), and IMO a good /etc/hosts is good enough (edit: luakit can also read the same blocklist format as µBlock, though it ignores cosmetic filters).

> hostility

I wouldn't say it was really hostility. But Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place. And they have millions of things to catch up at the time they ultimately decided they could only focus on a few things like Quantum and other things in Project Snappy. May be in the future.

Compared to Webkit the whole engine was designed as an embeddable engine from Day one.

> Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place.

This is untrue in the starkest sense. Please don't make stuff up and then present it as fact.

Embeddability was a major goal for Gecko at the outset. It's the reason for many of the architectural decisions that exist today (past the point where that goal has been abandoned).

except that Safari doesnt have a decent adblocker like ublock is for me a big issue. Plus Safari 15 must have some kind of a bug or something it drains my battery just like Brave.

That's beside the point. I didn't recommend Safari. Safari is a Web browser. The discussion is about alternatives to Blink and Gecko—browser engines, not browsers.

The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.