At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
I think what's been achieved in a little over a year with the Ladybird Browser from the SerenityOS project shows that it's quite possible to build a new browser from scratch. And yes, they are absolute heroes for doing it!
It's definitely impressive, and it shows it is possible to build a new browser. I don't think it shows it is possible to build a new browser that ordinary people will use though. That requires implementing a gazillion niche features that Chrome supports, and compatibility with a gazillion broken websites.
Probably with web browsers the last 0.1% is 99.9% of the work.
A lot of us would be happy to have a browser that doesn't try to support the gazillion features of chrome and Firefox, if it instead gave us the ability to browse the web on our own terms instead of one company's vision of what the web should be.
I share the sentiment. Reality is often physical businesses now require visiting their website, sometimes even in person, and they just don't work unless the browser is Chromium based.
Literally today I had to upload a drivers license in person yet on my phone to rent a truck. Of course Firefox failed, and even Chrome glitched, yet Chrome could be made to work with it's alternate uploader.
Amen to that --- and those who do will quickly lament the state of the "Modern Web"; fuckings to CloudFlare and the like for gatekeeping and calling everyone who doesn't use even slightly non-mainstream browsers or configurations (no JS? Filtering proxy?) a bot. A disappointingly large percentage of sites are behind such walls, and another large number of them are otherwise static content that requires JS to display.
But not giving up is the first step to success. I probably wouldn't use a browser in Go either, but as someone who has also been working on one of my own intermittently and knows how much opposition there is, I certainly encourage any attempts at increasing actual browser diversity.
as others mentioned, some people don't care about market share. the browsers I use day to day (Firefox, Chrome) are honestly pretty bloated and terrible, so I think others would agree that quality wise, users are starving for something better.
Even though Go is unlikely to be an ideal choice for a web browser, I had definitely wanted to venture into it just as a toy project. Unfortunately, it's obviously an enormous project, so I am absolutely nowhere on it.
The truth is, I'd like to still work on this and even see if it's plausible to build a decent JIT without going too far into the weeds (I wouldn't tolerate a requirement on Cgo personally) but given that I never even pushed up an interpreter (I had an AST-based interpreter, but it was so ugly that I scrapped it :) I doubt I'll get anywhere near Opossum. Oh well.
It'd still be fun to at least get some pages rendering. Probably no chance in hell I'd ever get over to milestones I'd actually like to (like booting GMail for example.)
I would say the browser ecosystem as a whole is thriving, there's all sorts of browsers for different needs, but most of them are based on the same couple web engines.
This looks like an implementation from scratch which is fantastic.
