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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

I hope they have as much success with this as they've had with VS Code and I'm looking forward to trying their first release of Edge on Linux. It will be great to have the choice of a non-Google, WebKit based browser from a major distributor who has the resources to keep up with and challenge Google on things like Manifest v3.

I find it somewhat ironic that the most used software I'm running on my Linux desktop, VS Code, is a free and open source Microsoft product. It's also the product that really enabled me to make the switch in comfort. Maybe soon though I'll be using Bing more too (among others like DDG) if Google decides to completely remove URLs from search result links.

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I use Vivaldi on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's the most customizable browser I've used since Opera 12 (which makes sense, since one of the Opera founders started Vivaldi).

Edge is based on Blink, not WebKit. Remember that Blink was forked from WebKit six years ago. In web time, that might as well be a century, given the leaps that have been made in web tech in browsers.

The new Edge is based on Chromium (Uses Blink as the engine), so I don't think it will challenge Google on things like Manifest v3.

Falkon is the KDE browser which is WebKit-based and not Google. It works on at least Linux and Windows. I believe the GNOME browser (Epiphany?) is also WebKit-based.

GNOME Web (aka Epiphany)¹ does use WebKitGTK², but Falkon³ uses QtWebEngine⁴, which is based on Chromium. Qt integrates "the layer rendering of Chromium directly into the OpenGL scene graph of Qt Quick" and does "not containing all of Chrome/Chromium:
- Binary files are stripped out
- Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out

- The codebase is modularized to allow use of system libraries like OpenSSL"

So Falkon is not like Opera and this new Edge which use almost everything from Chromium, including the app shell, but it's web engine is Chromium.

1: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/

2: https://webkitgtk.org/

3: https://www.falkon.org/

4: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

I believe Edge is based on Chromium not WebKit?

Chromium uses blink which was forked from WebKit long ago.

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