Smaller browsers built on webkit do exist; see ‘Epiphany’, ‘surf’, ‘luakit’, and ‘Nyxt’.
Qt’s web component used to be based on webkit as well, though they’ve switched to Blink (Chromium).
Unfortunately, none of the browsers listed above are 100% sufficient to replace Firefox. They all rely on GTK bindings on webkit, which has its own quirks; and none have support for webextensions.
Yes! In fact, Chromium was originally a fork of WebKit, as WebKit was a fork of KHTML. In both cases the codebases have diverged quite significantly though.
The core of Safari (WebKit) is open source. If it weren’t they’d be violating the GPL license of KHTML.
Ah, admittedly I don’t know much. Could another browser build on it like Chromium or Firefox?
Smaller browsers built on webkit do exist; see ‘Epiphany’, ‘surf’, ‘luakit’, and ‘Nyxt’. Qt’s web component used to be based on webkit as well, though they’ve switched to Blink (Chromium).
Unfortunately, none of the browsers listed above are 100% sufficient to replace Firefox. They all rely on GTK bindings on webkit, which has its own quirks; and none have support for webextensions.
Yes! In fact, Chromium was originally a fork of WebKit, as WebKit was a fork of KHTML. In both cases the codebases have diverged quite significantly though.