Which browser engine powers Safari?

Safari is powered by the WebKit browser engine.

Apple introduced Safari in January 2003, building it around WebKit, which Apple had developed from KDE’s KHTML and KJS technologies. WebKit supplies the core machinery that interprets web standards, lays out pages, and runs web content; Safari also uses JavaScriptCore for JavaScript execution.

WebKit is open source, although its components have different licensing histories. It became closely associated with Apple platforms and remains the required web-rendering foundation for browsers on iOS and iPadOS under Apple’s platform rules. That means even third-party iPhone browsers generally use WebKit underneath their interfaces.

A frequent confusion comes from Chrome and Blink. Chrome originally used WebKit-derived code, but Google forked WebCore in 2013 to create Blink, which now powers Chromium-based browsers. Gecko powers Firefox on most platforms, while Trident was the engine of legacy Internet Explorer. Safari’s canonical engine answer is WebKit.