Open Source Safari Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Safari.
The best open source alternative to Safari is Ladybird. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Safari alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Safari is Brave.
Safari alternatives are mainly Browsers & Extensions. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Safari.
Independent web browser built on a new engine written from scratch, currently pre-alpha and suitable only for developers.
Ladybird's engine was written from scratch against web standards rather than derived from an existing one, which is what makes it a truly independent browser. The aim is a complete, usable browser for the modern web, and the codebase is where that aim is being tested.
The design is multi-process: a main user interface process, several WebContent renderers, an image decoder process and a request server. Image decoding and network connections are deliberately out of process to hold up against malicious content, and every tab gets its own renderer, sandboxed from the rest of the system.
Many of the supporting libraries are inherited from SerenityOS.
- LibWeb and LibJS: the rendering engine and the JavaScript engine.
- LibWasm: the WebAssembly implementation.
- LibCrypto and LibTLS: cryptography primitives and transport layer security.
- LibGfx and LibMedia: 2D graphics, image decoding and rendering, plus audio and video playback.
- LibCore and LibIPC: the event loop, operating system abstraction and inter-process communication.
Ladybird builds on Linux, macOS, Windows through WSL2 and many other Unix-like systems, with build instructions and code documentation kept in the repository. It is explicitly pre-alpha and only suitable for developers, so treat it as something to hack on rather than something to browse with. The license is a two-clause BSD.
The Chromium-based browser with a Rust ad blocking engine built in, for people who want blocking without installing an extension.
Layered over Chromium as a set of changes, APIs and scripts, Brave inherits the web platform work that Chromium does while replacing the parts its authors did not want to ship.
The work is split across two repositories. This one holds issues, releases and the wiki, while brave-core carries the source and the build tools that fetch and sync Chromium through depot_tools, mount brave-core at src/brave and maintain patches for third party Chromium code.
A few details of that arrangement matter if you are evaluating it.
- Ad blocking engine: adblock-rust implements the blocker and is linked into the browser through a foreign function interface.
- Pinned Chromium: the build sets an explicit Chromium branch rather than tracking head.
- Platform coverage: development environments are documented for Android, Linux, iOS, macOS and Windows.
- Build tooling: two package manager scripts drive init and then component, release, static or debug builds.
- Translations: interface strings are translated by the community on Transifex.
Building from source downloads the Chromium history, tens of gigabytes of it, and takes a long time, so most people should take a stable release from the website instead. Technical documentation and guides sit in brave-core, while a separate community forum handles support questions and feature requests.
