Couple main reasons: 1) BSD license vs a CopyLeft license. Edge, Opera etc don't want to push their changes back up. 2) Compatibility and performance is why Brave switched from Gecko to Chromium. 75% of the marketshare is chromium based browsers so sites will more than likely work with chromium browsers.

I don't why webkit is more popular. Maybe because it(Apple) is slow to adopt standards.

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swiftcoder 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Maybe because it(Apple) is slow to adopt standards

I think this is an interesting bit of propaganda - they are historically not all that slow to adopt actual standards.

What they often are is unwilling to adopt Google's pre-standardisation extensions (things like WebUSB, which have never been adopted as standards).

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adrr 6 hours ago | parent [-]

WebGPL, WebRTC, Gamepad API, WebASM etc Years behind Gecko and Chromium. Don't get me started on codec support with Safari. Webkit is the new IE.

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swiftcoder 5 hours ago | parent [-]

WebGPU not yet a W3C standard (it's at the previous step, as a "candidate recommendation"). Apple's WebGPU implementation went live before Firefox's implementation.

WebRTC went live in Safari the same year that the non-draft version went live in Chrome (Chrome supported the pre-standard webkit-prefixed version for some years before).

Similarly, Safari added support for WASM the same year that WASM was standardised (once again, Chrome supported a pre-standard version ahead of standardisation).

	▲	nwienert 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea the funny thing is that the real lie is that Safari is behind, that hasn’t been true for many years now. The further irony is calling it the “new IE” when in fact it’s Chrome that is far more similar to the IE of old, at least in terms of the dirty tricks - dominant market share, uses it to push non-standards, stuffs in user hostile features to the brim, and spies on you incessantly. The only difference is it’s not terrible at performance.

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jnrk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I don't why webkit is more popular.

Because Safari comes pre-installed on billions of devices?