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While writing a browser in Rust might not be, per-se, particularly experimental anymore, nobody has written a browser engine from scratch since KHTML in 1998, a

While writing a browser in Rust might not be, per-se, particularly experimental anymore, nobody has written a browser engine from scratch since KHTML in 1998, and with the growth in complexity of the web since then it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition—we've come a long way in the past decade in better defining many historically undefined fundamental parts of the platform, particularly in HTML5 and CSS2.1. At the same time, there are still parts of the platform that remain largely undefined. Apple's work on WebKit for several years after forking KHTML was essentially just reverse-engineering IE and fixing site-compatibility bugs; Opera had maybe 10% of all people working on Presto up until the end largely reverse-engineering the competition and fixing site-compatibility bugs; etc., etc., etc. That's not even the only interesting question: nobody has tried to parallelise layout before, and how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? How about Houdini?

kibwen 10y ago
> it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P > how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? Servo devs have definitely identified places in the HTML spec which, entirely by accident, require serial behavior. Having a pervasively-parallel browser will hopefully go a long way towards preventing such accidents in the future.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  > That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P I'd claim Opera (or rather the consortium that now own the Opera browser) have the most experience of reverse-engineering browsers, given Firefox's market-share solved a lot of the site-compat issues a long time before Opera gained market-share (oh, wait, it never did significantly after the rise of IE). On the other hand, almost nobody from the old Presto team is still at Opera, so… ;P

kibwen 10y ago

> it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P > how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? Servo devs have definitely identified places in the HTML spec which, entirely by accident, require serial behavior. Having a pervasively-parallel browser will hopefully go a long way towards preventing such accidents in the future.

gsnedders 10y ago
> That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P I'd claim Opera (or rather the consortium that now own the Opera browser) have the most experience of reverse-engineering browsers, given Firefox's market-share solved a lot of the site-compat issues a long time before Opera gained market-share (oh, wait, it never did significantly after the rise of IE). On the other hand, almost nobody from the old Presto team is still at Opera, so… ;P