@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t have the best experience with WebKit, at least not with WebKit2GTK on Linux. MacOS might be different, I don’t know. But on Linux, WebKit2GTK is always lightyears behind Firefox/Chromium in terms of … everything. That’s my experience with running WebKit2GTK browsers for well over a decade (luakit, uzbl, dwb, whatever). I even made my own browser at some point, but I recently basically decided to give up on it and go back to Firefox.

WebKit is an admirable project, but they simply cannot compete with the sheer man power of Firefox/Chromium. There are so many standards and new features all the time, the WebKit team can’t keep up with that. A funny/good/sad example is imgur.com: For a while, it’s completely unusable; then WebKit catches up and it works more or less (probably pretty slow, though); then imgur changes stuff, uses new browser features and, boom, your WebKit browser doesn’t work again; and this cycle repeats over and over.

All this makes me pretty sad (once more 😅). Here’s the thing: WebKit is super easy to use in a GTK program. It’s just another GTK widget. It’s totally possible for a single person to write a browser that he/she likes using WebKit2GTK as a rendering engine. If you could actually use the web with WebKit, we could see a ton of different browsers out there, all serving different needs and purposes.

(I tried building a browser around the Firefox engine or the Chromium engine, but this is muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more involved than WebKit2GTK. I quickly gave up on that. Sure thing, Firefox/Chromium don’t want you to just use their rendering engine …)