both the iOS 26.6.1 and iOS 18.7.10 updates patch serious issues in WebKit, the engine that underpins Apple’s Safari browser. They land nearly three weeks after iOS 26.6 patched 90 issues. No iOS 18 update was released at the time.

"The iOS 26.6.1 update fixes three flaws in the iPhone Kernel and nearly 20 in WebKit."

Boynton also calls out the sheer number of fixes in WebKit, which he calls “one of the largest attack surfaces on the platform.”

It wouldn’t be, if Apple would allow other browsers to use their own rendering engines.

It’s true… it’d be replaced by a much LARGER attack surface.

With everybody on Webkit, a vulnerability in it applies to every browser and nearly all apps on iOS. If other engines were allowed, a threat would only apply to apps using that engine.

On the flip side, keeping the engine centralized means that a single fix will close a hole in every app, keeping unmaintained apps safer.

I wonder if it would be possible to implement Firefox or Chromium in webassembly and run it on top of WebKit — it wouldn’t be as performant, but would be an extra layer of sandbox. You could theoretically do this in any app that uses WebKit too.

You can sideload this gecko browser called reynard browser, it’s not that hard to sideload if you have a laptop or pc you can connect your phone to.

It worked fine in my ios 18.5, sometimes even better than webkit browsers lol, I used it alongside orion. If I remember correctly it did glitch when I activated JIT but I am not sure if it even supported 18.5 idk.

I used lara to sideload more than 3 apps with free dev license but that doesn’t extend to all versions ofc there is sidestore + livecontainer for best sideloading but it still is not the best. And stickdebug for JIT and also GPS spoofing apparently and idk what else.

Hopefully it will also fix the extremely irritating connectivity bugs that came with 26.6 too

Wait a sec that isn’t just my WiFi being shitty??

Nope - it absolutely correlated with the update they pushed last Monday. My 5G (and to a lesser extent WiFi) started dropping to <no data>/SOS all the fucking time. Super frustrating. I think an intern must have fucked the netstack in some interesting way. Or vibe coded it.

Is it just me, or does it feel like iOS quality control has been slowly slipping each generation? Guess perhaps the scale makes it unmanageable.

Yes. My wife is an Apple fangirl still so I’ve made it a point to screenshot every little bug I run into, to send her so that she can see for herself. The platform is becoming hot garbage.

There are issues with individual apps like the Maps app, giving me the fucking walking time when I’m driving. The iMessage app is also pretty terrible, constantly freezing in longer threads of “parental requests” from the kiddos phones. Sometimes the iMessage app completely shits the bed and restarting the app doesn’t work, I need to restart the phone.

Other times it’s weird shit… like the phone gets stuck between two transitions, so I see my lock screen on top of my Home Screen.

I’m constantly finding myself trying to work around bullshit with iPhones.

I’d be fine with that, if it were a Linux phone that I could independently fix and contribute to. Such a thing does not exist. So instead, we must deal with the shortcomings of profit driven walled garden monopolies that feel they know better what’s best for you and your hardware, despite their lack of care for QA.