D would be interesting but it's also not memory-safe. Not strictly. You can restrict yourself to SafeD, but then you're stuck with a GC you don't really want. Or you can tag all your functions as @Safe, but then it's just a "best practice" and you can't do it everywhere because you can't do things like make system calls.

D has some interesting bits, but it did a lot of head-scratching stuff too. It seemed really confused about what target it was going after, like some middle ground between C#/Java & C/C++ that really doesn't seem to exist.

D was released in 2001, KHTML in 1998, it's like suggesting they should have written vim in java.

... and Chrome in 2008.

Chrome wasn’t written from scratch in 2008. Chrome was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of Konqueror, which was a fork of KHTML.

KHTML is the rendering engine for the Konqueror browser. Webkit is a fork of KHTML. And Chrome's engine is called Blink (it used to be Webkit, but they forked it).