Safari is NOT Transferring to Chromium Platform

A viral rumor circulating the web these days suggests that Apple is planning to rebuild its hyphenate macOS Safari, based on Google’s Chromium. You’re probably worried, if you’re an Apple fan. But, you need not to. Because the rumor just turned out to be fake.

The source of this rumor was a Russian blog, claiming that one of Apple’s employees had filed an issue on the Chromium Bug Tracker for enabling the ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) feature. This feature restricts ads or third parties from tracking user browsing. As one can also expect, this would have definitely been a Safari-exclusive feature.

Just a few days later, the blog admitted that the information turned out to be unreliable and the screenshot is fabricated. But even before that, our team knew what was wrong. When we zoomed in for details, there were some obvious irregularities. In one of the two images attached, you can notice bug number 483593 marked as private and therefore, it can’t be verified as true or false. But since bug numbers are issued sequentially on Chromium Bug Tracker, we can also safely assume that a higher bug number would be a new bug.

The picture was taken from the blog: Apple may transfer its browser to the Chromium platform

We decided to dig deeper and looked at the bug number 483594. We found out that the bug was public and issued back in 2015, whereas the bug in the screenshot was shown to be issued on December 24th, 2019. Even if we ignore this, there was insufficient evidence of any such claim in the Chromium Gerrit of ITP or even Apple employee’s email address (arnoldbarber[at]apple.com) as well. And then, a member of the Apple’s Webkit team Maciej Stachowiak directly denied this rumor by stating in his tweet:

“This is completely fake. No such plan. The supposed email address isn’t anyone on the Safari/WebKit teams, there is no ITP code in Chromium that could be enabled, and the screenshot is not a real Safari design.”

This put a final nail in the coffin for this short-lived rumor. While you may see mixed reactions to this, we believe that the rumor turning out to be false is good for the competition that Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have been indulged in for recent years. The innovation that each of them offers from time to time is making the life of every internet user better and hence copying would never serve to be ideal for neither Apple, nor Google or Microsoft.