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Comment by timw4mail | Hacker News Reader

The more features in browser engines, the fewer platforms the browsers work on.

The most feature rich browser engine (Chromium) is the one with most adaptation across all the most used platforms so that doesn't make sense unless you count users from something like AmigaOS and TVs and in that way get Firefox out on top by purely counting platforms. Otherwise Chromium on Windows, Mac and Linux beats anyone else by a mile.

Even for platforms that Chrome can't easily be ported to, WebKit itself has a very simple and actually reasonable porting API which led to it for example being used on Sony PlayStation platforms, but also being the most important browser engine on the Haiku OS.

In fact, Chrome originated as - and a lot of its code structure post-Blink-fork still signifies it as being - a meta-platform of its own with a WebKit port to it.

> but also being the most important browser engine on the Haiku OS

May not be the best example since Haiku's browser is often cited by people as a big reason they can't use it as a daily driver.

How so? That doesn't make sense.

I mean, if a platform doesn't support something, I wouldn't expect the browser to support it. Even if they decide that it is too hard to support a particular feature on a particular platform, doesn't mean they have to simply abandon the platform. They just don't support the feature.

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