New Alternative Web Browsers for macOS
I have long been concerned about the state of browsers and the dominant hegemony of one browser engine. OK, to be fair, it’s a duopoly, but one of those options is almost exclusively restricted to one platform, so it’s… Like many things in tech, it’s complicated.
First, a small and condensed history.
Way back in the technology pre-historic times of the late 90s one browser ruled the (small) online world. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It was so dominant, governments around the World charged Microsoft with running a monopoly and it’s historical tendrils rooting through global enterprises held up web development and the adoption of web standards until ridiculously recently.
Apple became so sick of their dependency on a competitor to provide web access to their users, they released Safari in 2003. Contrary to popular opinion at the time, Apple didn’t base it on Gecko, the engine in Netscape/Firefox, which was the other dominant browser at the time, but instead forked KHTML to create their own open source WebKit.
