https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
https://linus.dev/posts/ladybird-browser-year-in-review-2022...
Probably with web browsers the last 0.1% is 99.9% of the work.
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.
Web apps are >5MB piles of text, and they have a way of using pieces of browser behavior that you wouldn't expect.
Did the author express that his intent was to capture browser marketshare? If not, he may not be delusional :)
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.
This looks like an implementation from scratch which is fantastic.
However, if one changes the starting assumptions, e.g., only seek some basic functionality instead of a carbon copy of the existing browsers (but controlled by some new entity), then the playing field becomes level enough to have meaningful competition.
Another assumption is that all browsers must be "all-purpose". But some could just as well be limited purpose. Arguably we already see an extreme case of this in "mobile apps" which target only one site. Alas, these tend to be non-transparent, not open-source nor easily modifiable and recompilable.
As a text-only browser user, along with non-browser TCP clients, each being vastly simpler than a so-called "modern" browser, I am able to consume a large amount of web content without ever touching Javascript or graphics. That amount has surprisingly increased over time. More and more web content today comes as structured plaintext (JSON) which is very easy to convert into any format one desires.
IMHO, Javascript is likely a black hole for any "rudimentary" browser project. The size of the interpreter and the memory demands, entire classes of security issues that are enabled by Javascript, the list of "gotchas" is long if not endless. If JS is a must-have, I hope it's worth it.
That said, shameless plug: if anyone wants a reasonably complete but immature ECMA262 parser in Go, I did do that. You can see how (un)finished it is here, with the wasm build: https://cleansheets.io/parser/ - source here. https://github.com/jchv/cleansheets
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.)
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.