About this project

Reynard Browser is an experimental web browser for iOS 13 and later that uses the Gecko engine instead of Apple's WebKit. On iOS, Safari and third-party browsers are normally required to use WebKit, so Reynard aims to provide an alternative, more up-to-date browser engine. The project notes this is especially relevant on older iOS versions, where the bundled WebKit engine no longer receives updates and modern sites may break or render incorrectly. Key capabilities described in the README: - Gecko-based rendering engine, the same engine used by Firefox on desktop and Android. - Support for Firefox add-ons, including ad-blocking extensions. - Privacy features such as Enhanced Tracking Protection and DNS over HTTPS. - Builds for different installation methods: standard IPA for AltStore/SideStore (iOS 17.4+), TrollStore builds for iOS 14-16.6.1 and 17.0, and jailbroken builds for iOS 13 and jailbroken iOS 14. TrollStore and jailbroken builds provide automatic JIT enablement and better performance; the TrollStore build also supports automatic app updates. - AltSource support for adding the app to AltStore or SideStore. Installation notes: the project is early and experimental, so bugs and missing features are expected. For AltStore/SideStore, users must select "Keep App Extensions" during installation. LiveContainer is not supported, sideloading with a distribution certificate is not supported, and other sideloading methods may be incompatible. On jailbroken devices, the README recommends disabling tweak injection for Reynard and its extensions, for example with Choicy, and notes that support may be limited. Building from source requires Xcode, Python 3, and Rust/Cargo. The documented steps clone the repository recursively, download Gecko and apply patches, build dependencies and the Gecko engine, then open Reynard.xcodeproj in Xcode. The author states that build support is not provided. The project began as an experiment to run Gecko without Apple's BrowserEngineKit framework, allowing support for older iOS versions. The author invites contributions, feedback, and translation help via Crowdin. The code is licensed under GPLv3, while the patches directory modifying the Firefox Gecko engine is under MPL 2.0.