Possible to replace WebKit with another rendering engine?

[maverick28]

Webkit is at the core of not only Safari but all services that rely on it, these are iTunes Store, the Wikipedia articles built into Dictionary application. I wonder is it possible to replace it with Gecko or Chromium for better compatibility and how demanding and laborious that task would be?

 

[cmaier]

Webkit is at the core of not only Safari but all services that rely on it, these are iTunes Store, the Wikipedia articles built into Dictionary application. I wonder is it possible to replace it with Gecko or Chromium for better compatibility and how demanding and laborious that task would be?

You mean replace the rendering engine in Safari and the OS?

No, can’t be done in any practical sense.

 

[Velociround]

It can't be done, but to be honest it would not be an improvement either. If anything, it would be a downgrade. The Google Chrome engine is a fork of WebKit. WebKit on Safari is so much better optimised than Chromium that it's not even funny. Have you seen performance, memory and battery benchmarks comparing them?

Integrated services do not have compatibility issues with WebKit. It could be useful to switch on Safari if you are trying to browse a badly developed website that was designed only for Chrome, but then it could also have problems on Gecko.

If you are having compatibility issues with bad websites, try enabling the Developer mode on Safari and switching to a different user agent.