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Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

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That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.

It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with

It's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.

> It's not really using it for much text, though.

That's exactly the opposite of my perception—for instance, it's been used to render help/support databases on my Mac for at least twenty years.

Is that why settings search has been broken for years across iOS and macOS?

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