getEngine()

The rendering-engine counterpart to detect(). Returns one of the engines values, narrowed to the Engine union.

Signature	(options?: DetectOptions) => Engine
Returns	'blink' | 'gecko' | 'webkit' | 'trident' | 'presto' | 'edgehtml' | 'unknown'
SSR safe	✅ Pass { userAgent } to pin

Why the engine, not the brand?

Rendering bugs live in the engine, not the badge on the icon. Two reasons this is the function you often actually want:

1. iOS forces WebKit on everyone. Apple requires every browser on iOS/iPadOS to use WKWebView. Chrome-iOS, Firefox-iOS, and Edge-iOS all render with WebKit — they just paint a different UI on top. detect() honestly reports them as chrome / firefox / edge, but for a rendering workaround you want getEngine(), which reports webkit for all of them in one check.

2. The whole Chromium family shares Blink. Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc — all Blink. If your fix is engine-level, getEngine() === engines.BLINK is one comparison instead of five.

import { getEngine, engines } from 'get-browser';

// One check covers Safari + Chrome-iOS + Firefox-iOS + Edge-iOS.
if (getEngine() === engines.WEBKIT) {
  applyWebkitScrollFix();
}

Don't hand-roll browser → engine

A naive { chrome: 'blink', safari: 'webkit', … }[detect()] lookup is wrong on iOS — it maps Chrome-iOS to Blink when the page is really rendered by WebKit. getEngine() reads the platform from the UA and gets it right.

The engines enum

export const engines: {
  readonly BLINK:    'blink';
  readonly EDGEHTML: 'edgehtml';
  readonly GECKO:    'gecko';
  readonly PRESTO:   'presto';
  readonly TRIDENT:  'trident';
  readonly WEBKIT:   'webkit';
  readonly UNKNOWN:  'unknown';
};

Value	Engine	Browsers
blink	Blink (Chromium)	Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, modern Android WebView
gecko	Gecko	Firefox on every platform except iOS
webkit	WebKit	Safari, every browser on iOS/iPadOS, pre-2014 Android Browser
trident	Trident	Internet Explorer 6–11
presto	Presto	Opera 12 and earlier, Opera Mini
edgehtml	EdgeHTML	Legacy Microsoft Edge 12–18 (the Edge/ token)
unknown	—	bots, brand-new engines, empty UA

Blink vs "Chromium": Blink is the engine; Chromium is the project it lives in. The canonical value is 'blink' — that's the actual rendering engine, and it's what ua-parser-js and bowser report too.

Detection order

Most-specific first:

1. Trident — Trident/ or MSIE.
2. EdgeHTML — the legacy Edge/ token (checked before Blink, since those UAs also carry Chrome/).
3. Presto — Presto/ or Opera Mini.
4. WebKit (iOS) — any iPhone / iPad / iPod, or CriOS / FxiOS / EdgiOS / OPiOS. Every iOS browser is WebKit.
5. Gecko — a real Gecko/<digits> build token or Firefox/ (Chromium's "like Gecko" is deliberately not matched).
6. Blink — Chrome/, Chromium/, Edg/, or OPR/.
7. WebKit (Safari / legacy) — any remaining Safari/ / AppleWebKit — desktop Safari or the legacy Android Browser.
8. 'unknown'.

Examples

WebKit workaround

import { getEngine, engines } from 'get-browser';

// iOS Safari (and therefore every iOS browser) needs the 100vh fix.
if (getEngine() === engines.WEBKIT) {
  const setVh = () =>
    document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--vh', `${innerHeight * 0.01}px`);
  setVh();
  addEventListener('resize', setVh, { passive: true });
}

Honest analytics

import { detect, getEngine } from 'get-browser';

// `browser` answers "who", `engine` answers "what renders it" — and it's
// correct on iOS, where every browser is really WebKit.
analytics.track('page_view', {
  browser: detect(),
  engine: getEngine(),
});

SSR

import { getEngine } from 'get-browser';

export function GET(req: Request) {
  const engine = getEngine({ userAgent: req.headers.get('user-agent') ?? '' });
  return Response.json({ engine });
}

Unit test

import { describe, expect, it } from 'vitest';
import { getEngine, engines } from 'get-browser';

it('treats Chrome-on-iOS as WebKit', () => {
  const ua =
    'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 ' +
    '(KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/131.0.6778.135 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1';
  expect(getEngine({ userAgent: ua })).toBe(engines.WEBKIT);
});

Pairs with detect() and getOS()

Three orthogonal axes — who, what renders it, where it runs:

import { detect, getEngine, getOS } from 'get-browser';

// Chrome on an iPhone:
detect();     // → 'chrome'   (the brand)
getEngine();  // → 'webkit'   (what actually paints — WKWebView)
getOS();      // → 'ios'      (the platform)

Caveats

• Not a feature check. Knowing the engine is not the same as knowing a feature is supported. For "does this support :has()?" use CSS.supports() / @supports. getEngine() is for grouping known engine-level quirks and for analytics.
• edgehtml / presto are effectively extinct but reported honestly when their UAs appear. Exhaustive switch statements should still handle them (or use a default).

See also

• detect() — the browser brand.
• getOS() — the operating system.
• engines — the frozen enum.
• types — the Engine union.