Technical question: What would a third party browser rendering engine allow, that using the safari renderer doesn't? I figure if you make a browser by just wrapping the safari renderer then you can make it do whatever you want it to. Why does the renderer make such that big of a difference?
Actual extensions (like ublock!), bleeding edge/experimental web features like new webassembly or web APIs (firefox and chrome usually implement these before Safari does), stuff Apple has decided to sabotage because it threatens the app store (like fullscreen).
Safari has supported “actual extensions” for two yeass.
Yes but their API is very limited and by design doesn't allow a good ad blocker like ublock to be built.
The actual “extension” framework does. It’s used by 1Blocker. Not just the “we send you a JSON set of rules”.
But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy, why would you trust a third party to intercept all of your web traffic?
> But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy, why would you trust a third party to intercept all of your web traffic?
uBlock Origin is free and open source, and its code is thoroughly reviewed by many contributors every release. I trust uBlock Origin over a filtering mechanism built into a closed source browser such as Safari.
WebKit is also open source and you can see exactly how it works.
But did you personally download the open source version review the code and install it?
Yes, I have personally downloaded the uBlock Origin source code. I have also reviewed the code and suggested improvements. However, I don't even need to download the code to realize the benefits of uBlock Origin being free and open source. Even if I hadn't downloaded the code, there are many other users and contributors who have reviewed the code, and you can confirm this by taking a simple look at the activity in the GitHub repos.