Expert developer, Buddhist
Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS
The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)
Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business
And somehow breaking even more sites than safari; missing many modern features
Welllll I mean technically webkit is totally separate from chromes blink fork for the last several years. I.e. browers like safari and gnome’s epiphany. That said, safari is mac/iOS only and epiphany sucks ass so…
Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org