I don't want Chromium to win. Now its monopoly is removed, Apple can now actually invest in Safari so it's no longer "the new IE6". Since regulators started looking, Apple has really put work into it. Let's hope this continues. WebKit runs on Mac, Linux, Android and Windows (there used to be Safari/ Win). If anyone has money, marketing clout and brand loyalty to make a brilliant cross-platform Safari to compete against Chrome. If anyone can, it's Apple.
@brucelawson exists is the correct term. Thrive, less so, if you check marketshare.
(Partly thanks to Apple forcing everyone to use the safari engine on mobile, and nearly every other browser maker just copying chromium with some bells and whistles)
@jan Yes - but they did nothing with it for years, instead chasing their tails with FFOS. Their own engineers told me this when I met them in a pub in London to discuss PWAs when I worked for Opera.
@jan I can't speak for Vivaldi. At Opera we couldn't keep up with the pace of innovation that the megacorps were doing, so looked for an open-source browser. We chose WebKit (before the Blink fork) because (IIRC) there were difficulties/ license problems embedding Gecko in devices, (At the time Opera browsers were in consoles, kiosks, aeroplane displays, etc).
@brucelawson@jan "Before the Blink fork" is, I think, underselling the relatively amusing timing of it all. As I recall Opera put out a blog post saying "We're switching to WebKit, via Chromium" mere weeks before we were planning to announce the Blink fork. The blog post even went out of its way to specify that WebKit was picked for compatibility, because it was so ubiquitous.
Meanwhile on the Chrome side we're all looking at each other going "Uh.... Who's gonna tell them?"
@jan I don't recall what the issues were with Gecko, because I wasn't in the room when the discussions happened. It's worth noting that Presto stayed powering Opera Mini because it was so efficient compared to Blink. We would have had to run and staff several more data centres to serve the same amount of pages with Blink.
@jan Oh, totally different. The Chinese took it over, and within 3 days most of us were made redundant. AFAIK it no longer makes any commits to Blink (when I was there it was the 2nd after Google). I haven't got it installed anywhere save Opera Mini on a burner phone for testing.
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