The main problem is the mess that is called html/css. You can't "just" build a simple browser with limited resources anymore. And by limited i mean thousands of man-years of work backed by a multi million organization. I don't know if it is a calculated taktic from google to rapidly expanding and driving the web forward (i still hope the intention – at least at the beginning – was in good faith) so that nobody starting today from scratch could ever catch up. But i guess everybody that started to build a simple hobby web browser knows how unachievable this task is. If we ever want competition in this field again and don't want to handover the web to google, we need to start from scratch or at least start to massively deprecate stuff. And by the grave of Alan Turing start by making a website fail to render if the html is not correct.
>> And by limited i mean thousands of man-years of work backed by a multi million organization.
It's so sad. We're so trapped. Fortunately, Google (or any other) can't completely alienate a huge part of the web. So eventhough they control the browser, they don't control its content...
HN wants the rest of the world to be as angry and frustrated at the modern web as they are, but the rest of the world, for the most part does not care.
That's the harsh fact as it stands. No amount of GitHub stars, blog-posts, retweets or news coverage would help it further in its goal. I mean, the author is the only commiter, which is already a high risk of failure.
The way this will work will be similar to any project with the complexity and funds like the Linux Kernel Project: Recurring sponsorship funds in around $1M+ per month with 1,000 core developers and 10,000 external active developers at other companies also using this Rust browser.
This can also be turned into a Rust consultancy offering their services and expertise around security and Rust which also funds the development of this "Rust Browser" marketed as "more secure than Chrome".
That whole idea sounds almost unrealistic if starting from scratch, but it has worked for the Linux Kernel Project and Red Hat. It sounds more possible if it were spun out of an existing large company. But would it be open-source? I don't think so.
