A browser is the place you keep a day’s work open. It’s also the thing drawing each of those pages. We wanted Ortix to feel distinctly ours in the first job, and to stand on the Mac’s own foundation for the second.
The engine comes with your Mac#
WebKit is the open-source engine that powers Safari. Apple develops it with the WebKit community, and anyone can read the engine’s source. Ortix uses the unmodified system version supplied by macOS.
When an Apple software update improves the WebKit installed on your Mac, Ortix uses the updated engine. That includes the WebKit security fixes Apple ships for your system. A new improvement to the way pages work can reach Ortix through the same updates you already install for your Mac.
The browser is what we build#
Ortix itself is a proprietary app. We chose to build the browser around WebKit as an independent, proprietary product. Ortix Pro helps fund the work that’s ours to do. Into letting two Spaces keep their own sign-ins. Into opening a link over the page you were reading. Into letting you ask EVVE about a sentence without leaving the place you wrote it.
A separate engine fork would be another piece of software for us to build, patch and ship. Using the system version keeps that work with the people who develop WebKit and gives us more time to make the browser around it feel at home on your Mac.
See how Ortix uses WebKit. Explore the WebKit project. Find Apple’s security releases.
