Yeah, except it's pure bullshit. I'm actually a tiny bit irritated they worded it like this because it's insultingly misleading.
"From day one, we made the deliberate choice to build Orion on WebKit, the open‑source engine at the heart of Safari and the broader Apple ecosystem."
Chromium's Blink is based on Webkit and was for YEARS. While Blink and Webkit had some major differences now, it's not Webkit that's the better core now.
They picked Webkit because it's fast and easy, what ships on both MacOS and iOS. They couldn't put an alternative engine in the iOS and distribute it outside of Europe, so they stuck with webkit. For an Apple-only application, it's a smart choice for fast development, but it's NOT an act of resistance AT ALL. It's completely caving to Apple.
This is not a bold new choice in the browser space, it's just another privacy focused Webkit browser. That's great, but pretending this is sticking it to the man is delusional.
I'm curious about your definition of "better". It's nice that Google is catching up to Safari on Speedometer benchmarks (Blink was 20% slower a year ago), so at minimum one can appreciate Safari for being the mechanical hare that triggers Google's prey instinct. Bun chose WebKit's JavaScriptCore for performance reasons. Safari's supposedly-poor support for web standards is mostly Google propaganda.
Google propaganda or not, Mac owners aren't sticking with this "superior" preeinstalled browser tech. And I get it, as a Linux user I find WebKit intolerable compared with Blink and even Gecko.
Installing Chrome on MacOS is a cargo cult thing. Devs tell everyone to install Chrome, and everyone tells everyone else to install Chrome. (Except some devs who tell some friends to install Firefox.)
Zero devs say install Safari, it's already there. And there's no hip narrative for just using what's there even though it saves energy, protects privacy, seamlessly works across devices, and more.
Safari's problem: it doesn't signal tech savvy (Chrome) or anti-establishment (Firefox).
Amongst many other things, I need to deal with web sites and webapps, and without fail Safari users are the ones who hit the most bugs. Sometimes to the point I'll straight up state ahead of time that we will not spend extra time supporting Safari on MacOS. If it's propaganda, then it's incredibly effective.
"From day one, we made the deliberate choice to build Orion on WebKit, the open‑source engine at the heart of Safari and the broader Apple ecosystem."
Chromium's Blink is based on Webkit and was for YEARS. While Blink and Webkit had some major differences now, it's not Webkit that's the better core now.
They picked Webkit because it's fast and easy, what ships on both MacOS and iOS. They couldn't put an alternative engine in the iOS and distribute it outside of Europe, so they stuck with webkit. For an Apple-only application, it's a smart choice for fast development, but it's NOT an act of resistance AT ALL. It's completely caving to Apple.
This is not a bold new choice in the browser space, it's just another privacy focused Webkit browser. That's great, but pretending this is sticking it to the man is delusional.