this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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They are skins over someone else's browser.
KDE's Konqueror uses Qt WebEngine, which is developed by the Qt Company and is based on Google:s Chromium.
GNOME's Epiphany uses WebKit, developed by Apple.
Trisquel's Abrowser is a rebranded Mozilla Firefox.
Ironically, all of these things except Abrowser are based on Konqueror’s original engine, KHTML, so Konqueror was actually the OG engine. KHTML was forked to WebKit, which was forked to Blink, which became the underpinnings of Qt WebEngine, which Konqueror now uses.
This is also why KHTML still appears in the user agent strings for all of these engines, but back in the day the Gecko engine used in Mozilla products was already a thing and KHTML was the alternative to that, hence “KHTML, like Gecko”.
KHTML was truly a milestone in Free Software history. Immense respect to KDE developers.
webkit is not developed by apple, they're just using it for safari and contributing surprisingly little to the actual project
If you look on the Github page of the project, most of the recent commits are submitted by Apple employees.