Because you can have something usable instead of dreams. If you want to have completely independent code eventually, then replace modules one by one, while having a working product. Like Mozilla did with Servo. They had C++ codebase they wanted to replace with Rust codebase. They did not create entire browser from scratch, but replaced C++ with Rust gradually. While one figures what HTML and CSS layout should look like, no need to have no JavaScript engine and basically unusable browser. Use existing JavaScript engine, replace it later when/if project has enough resources.

Why is it "dreams" if they're making quantifiable progress toward their goal? The browser is steadily becoming more usable and performant. Proving that such a project is possible is one of Andreas (the project lead's) goals as stated in interviews.

I'd rather encourage promising "dreams" than have a web with only 2.5 usable browser engines.

This is Hacker News, not just Lets Bring Yet Another Product To Market news.

He is doing this for fun and to be creative, is incredibly inspiring for a lot of people, and actually gets things done on top.

The epitome of a hacker, I want to be more like him.

You have a very different definition than what this site has historically been about. :)

Have you ever wondered what ycombinator.com is in news.yconbinator.com?

Do you want what you're arguing for?

Yeah yeah, I know. They could have chosen to call it Startup News but didn't.

Andreas worked professionally on WebKit at Apple and succeeded in writing SerenityOS from scratch.

So he is in a good position to decide on the approach and has proven he can finish things. I’d just trust him on this, if my opinion was even relevant.

But as it’s a for fun project, he can write a browser in Fortran and abandon it half-way ;-)

They already do have something that is incredibly usable for how long the project has been going (this context is part of why you're being downvoted, as well as just the general principle). They have probably got something that is looking more viable as a new browser than what the Servo project is doing now it's been detached from Mozilla. It really is quite incredible what they've done, and the velocity it's improving is just mind-blowing.

Sometimes it's nice to dream. A nice bonus if other people respect your autonomy to use one's time on Earth as one sees fit.

Dreams are what gets you out of bed in the morning.

It's very possible to have other goals than having a usable and marketable product, Andreas Kling and SerenityOS developpers have explicitly stated other goals on numerous occasions, and other positive side-effects have emerged from the project. These include having something to stay busy long term to stay away from drug use, having fun, learning, prove that things are possible, identifying and reporting mistakes in specifications that were caught thanks to the blank slate implementation approach.

Maybe Ladybird is not usable right away, so what? It's getting impressively close to this point with barely 5 years of development, from scratch (and it goes much deeper than HTML, CSS and JS engine, they also re-implemented the whole networking stack, image/audio/video codecs, font...) and by a small team of mostly volunteers, but more importantly, it's a positive project not only for the developers, but also for their audience and for greater scale web standardization.

I hardly imagine a project such as the one you're describing getting as much traction as Ladybird / SerenityOS (in fact, there are many such of these, but I don't see nearly as much talk and interest for their development), the whole project isn't about the end product, it's explicitly about the process to get there.

> you can have something usable instead of dreams

Realising dreams is called progress.

The reason Chrome and Firefox exist is because people dreamt of having something better than the already "usable" Internet Explorer.