Liam on Linux

From a Quora answer, because I like to keep my words outside of their walled garden.

The World Wide Web was originally developed on NeXT computers and the NeXTstep operating system and released around 1991.

This is the same year as the Linux project started, so the early 3rd party web browsers did not run on Linux; it barely existed yet. They ran on Windows and classic MacOS. (Mac OS X did not exist yet either.)

The most successful 2 were:

• Navigator from Netscape, codenamed “Mozilla”.


• Internet Explorer from Microsoft, based on code licensed in from Spyglass.

Both are proprietary code, available free of charge, but Netscape required a paid version for commercial use. Both are based on Mosaic from the NCSA.

Due in large part to illegal anti-competitive measures from Microsoft, for which it was found guilty in the US courts, Netscape went out of business. It was split up. Part (the browser) went to AOL, part (the web server) to Sun.

The unfinished next version of the browser, Communicator 5, was open-sourced as the Mozilla Project. However it took years to finish. The complete, working but proprietary Netscape 3 and 4 were not open-sourced.

Back to Linux.

The first complete FOSS Linux desktop environment was KDE. KDE had to re-implement a lot of technology that existed as proprietary code on Windows and classic MacOS. There was no Linux office suite yet — what would become OpenOffice and later LibreOffice was still a commercial, proprietary product, StarOffice.

KDE implemented a file manager (Konqueror), an office suite (KOffice), text editor (Kate), media players and much more.

KDE also implemented a web browser. This was integrated into the file manager, Konqueror. The KDE project wrote its own web-page rendering engine for this, called KHTML. This was the most complete FOSS browser engine after Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

When Apple bought NeXT and made the NeXTstep OS into the basis of the future Mac OS X, it needed a web browser. Mac OS X is built on a lot of FOSS code, much of it from the FreeBSD project. It did not include a web browser — FreeBSD uses Firefox (and others).

At first, Apple included Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. (This had prior history: older versions of classic MacOS bundled IE, Netscape, and Apple’s own, discontinued CyberDog browser.)

Apple decided that it needed its own, independent browser for Mac OS X. But writing a browser is a huge, complex task. So, it took the FOSS KHTML tool from KDE, and made that the basis of Safari, the new Apple web browser.

As KHTML is FOSS code, it needed to release its changes. It did this in the form of WebKit.

WebKit started out as KHTML, separated out from KDE and rewritten for OS X. Like KHTML before it, it was the leading FOSS browser engine. Apple did so much work on it that KDE re-adopted WebKit as the basis for its own browser, effectively replacing KHTML.

FOSS is cyclical like this: code is adopted from one project into another, improved, and sometimes goes back to its original creators in new form.

When Google also decided to do its own browser, Chrome, it used WebKit as the basis. Like WebKit and KHTML, Chrome is developed as an open-source project, called Chromium. This is mainly done by Google staff and is mainly paid for by Google.

So there are 2 branches of the Google browser: Chromium, which is FOSS, and Chrome, which is proprietary. Both are freeware.

Unfortunately, in English, the word for “at no price” is the same as the word for “at liberty”. The meanings are different, but both use the word “free”. In French, they are two different words: gratuit means no price, libre means at liberty.

Chromium is libre. Chrome is not. Both are gratuit. Software that is gratuit is often called “freeware”. “Freeware” is not the same as FOSS.

Google later forked the WebKit project. This means it took it in its own direction and stopped giving the changes back upstream to Apple. Google’s fork of WebKit is called Blink. Blink is the engine that powers the current versions of both Chromium and Chrome.

Microsoft has adopted Blink as the engine for future versions of Edge. This replaces its own in-house MSHTML engine, codenamed Trident.

So future Microsoft browsers will use the same engine as Chromium/Chrome, which is closely related to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE’s Konqueror.

This does not mean Microsoft is using Chrome, which is proprietary, or Chromium. Apple is not using Chromium/Chrome either, but the Blink engine is based on Apple’s WebKit.