this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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The author of the article can't even be bothered to keep his server up-to-date (my first attempt at viewing the article bounced me with a warning that suggests he only has obsolete crypto protocols available for SSL—why bother with SSL at all, then?). He's quite correct that this initiative is going to come to nothing.
There are currently only four web rendering engines that could be considered remotely usable as daily drivers: WebKit, its fork Blink, and Gecko, with its fork Goanna. WebKit and Blink both have major corporate backing (Apple and Google respectively). Gecko has the Mozilla Foundation paying the major bills. Even Pale Moon's Goanna has multiple people working on it (and since it's my daily driver, I know it has persistent issues with a few sites that have to be papered over with extensions). And the rendering engine is not the only thing you need for a browser, just the largest single part. A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.
It's a pet project; it doesn't need to be "viable".
I think this attitude is part of the reason why we have so few browsers. Every time someone tries to start their own browser, even just for fun, a lot of the response is just bitching about how big and complex browsers are and how the effort to start a new one is wasted. It makes it so that people interested in writing their own browser (for fun or profit) are less likely to share about it and probably less likely to pursue it seriously