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> Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons Not entirely true: Every browser developer is free to
by linopolus 9y ago
> Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons
Not entirely true: Every browser developer is free to use whatever engine they like on iOS. Mozilla could use Gecko, Google could use Blink. They just don’t do it, because what’s not allowed is JITs (because security), thus 3rd-party JS-engines would always be slow.
So the reason everybody uses WebKit on iOS is not that they are forbidden own engines, but only JITs, so Apples is faster.
- yorwba 9y agoWould it be possible to use WebKit for JavaScript execution, but still do rendering in a different engine?
- icebraining 9y agoI don't think you could plug directly into the JS engine to allow it to interact with your DOM.
- steveklabnik 9y agoI believe you're incorrect. First of all: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript. The JIT thing was true, but a few years back, they lifted this restriction, see "4.7 HTML5 Games, Bots, etc." for its current incarnation which also says "your app must use WebKit and JavaScript Core to run third party software".