Chrome is the sole benchmark. If it works in Chrome, it's fine, if it doesn't the site is broken. Standards never enter the discussion.
Even Mozilla can't do it.
It moves slower than people assume; I installed Opera 12 last year for the craic – the last version built on their Presto engine, released almost ten years ago – and it works surprisingly well with many sites. I did have to use mitmproxy to rewrite some trivial stuff like some CSS prefixes and s/(let|const)/var/ in JS. Flexboxes are supported, but grid isn't so that failed for some sites.
> Drew's points still stands unchallenged
His points are based on a faulty assumption to start with: he counts all sorts of documents, but that count is spectacularly wrong as it counts many things it shouldn't. I mentioned this at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617721
Is it a large project? Sure, as many software projects are. But "impossible" and "comparable to the Manhattan project"? Certainly not; it's just that there's not a whole lot of money to be made with a new browser engine or other broadly shared motivation.
And Drew himself answered you at the time on points made to your comment, that is things you said shouldn't be included that should and others you said were incorrectly included but were instead excluded in first place.
Whether the web is "too complex" is a different matter and open to interpretation as "too complex" is subjective. But the data very wrong and therefore the article is wrong. A "correct" conclusion with faulty arguments is just as worthless as an incorrect conclusion: any possible solution depends on a correct understanding of the situation. "Global warming happens because of pornography, therefore we must ban pornography" is just as useless as "global warming is a fake fraud" even though the conclusion of the first is correct.
It takes a minute to spot-check; some specific examples were provided in the previous thread. I don't have the list any more and can't be bothered to recreate it; what value is there if you can just check Drew's list – which is really not that hard? I also have no idea how correct it is, exactly; I suspect the actual number would be even lower still.
The two most important keywords in Drew's blogpost is *serious* and *security*. There is not one mention of either of those words in this blog post; hence Drew's points still stands unchallenged.
You can try, but so did Servo which was a 'serious attempt' and not even the Rust hype could convince the masses that it was better than Chrome.