There was a weird report making the social rumor rounds this morning that Apple would abandon WebKit as the Safari HTML rendering engine in favor of Google's Chromium fork.
It started with ChromeUnboxed:
A day after Christmas, a reader delivered a tasty little present to our collective inbox and the implications are pretty big. If the screenshots in this email/article are to be believed, it looks like Apple may be transitioning the Safari web browser over to Chromium in a move similar to what Microsoft has done recently with Edge. It is shocking, honestly, to consider Apple bending this way, but it makes a lot of sense in the long run.
Only no. Not at all.
And from someone better positioned than just about anyone to know about the present and future of WebKit:
This is completely fake. No such plan. The supposed email address isn’t anyone on the Safari/WebKit teams, there is no ITP code in Chromium that could be enabled, and the screenshot is not a real Safari design.This is completely fake. No such plan. The supposed email address isn’t anyone on the Safari/WebKit teams, there is no ITP code in Chromium that could be enabled, and the screenshot is not a real Safari design.— Maciej Stachowiak 🇵🇱🇺🇦 (@othermaciej) December 27, 2019December 27, 2019
I usually wouldn't repost a tweet like that, but WebKit is open source and the nature of the rumor is such that it will no doubt spread like wildfire if it isn't put down. Hard.
But really, it shouldn't even need to be busted. Like I said in response to the original link on Twitter:
I'll believe it when I'm clawing out my cold dead eyes to see it.Chromium exists to serve Google's priorities, not the open web's. Microsoft embracing it (and devs catering to it) was bad for the open web. Apple doing so too would be almost the end of it.Also: Don't build for Chrome/Chromium. Or Safari/WebKit. Force all the browsers towards widely supported standards.We didn't defeat IE just to expediency the web into another corporate jail.
We need multiple browser engines competing to best implement the standards, and that means Safari's WebKit and Firefox's Gecko have to embraced and supported every bit as much, maybe more, than the dominant Chrome Chromium/Blink fork. And Microsoft should consider bringing back Edge, even if it hurts Electron performance. Because Electron isn't a solution. It's a symbol of the problem.
Happy holidays browser engineers, every one!
