@Microplastics101 @tinker @Mercutio @librewolf Right now the only feasible alternative in the ecosystem is a project called Servo https://servo.org/. It is not a fully functional browser yet, just the rendering engine. Plus, it isn't finished yet.

But, the rendering engine is fully independent. Its not based on either Chromium's Blink engine or Mozilla's Gecko engine.

The idea is, sort of like how developers can fork Chromium or Firefox, and make a bunch of changes to it but the core behavior of fetching and rendering a page stays the same. Its supposed to have some major speed and security improvements baked in to the design so the end result can compete with Mozilla and Google.

I'm a web developer. The web is the single most complicated technology ever built, and it has been built by thousands of brilliant people over decades. The web browser is the most sophisticated and well engineered piece of software most people will ever use.

A good web browser needs to be able to make every half-baked, over engineered, or nearly forgotten feature of the web work in order for the experience to feel seamless (and there are thousands of features, old language quirks, and graphical considerations, etc.). It is a massive undertaking that takes huge investment, and a lot of time and brainpower. Hence, why most projects to make a new browser usually start by copying an existing one.

If you have a few bucks laying around at the end of the year, the Servo folks would be a great group to donate to.

@tinker @Microplastics101 @Mercutio @librewolf …and Microsoft Internet Explorer was a fork of Spyglass Mosaic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer

I have seen Internet Explorer 2.0 (running on Windows NT 4.0) and it is a dead ringer for NCSA Mosaic.

Not many people have written a graphical browser from scratch in the 20th century. The ones I can think of…

- Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web
- NCSA Mosaic
- Netscape Navigator (? possibly shared code with the original NCSA Mosaic until it was open-sourced as Mozilla)
- CNRI Grail
- Dillo
- Arachne
- IBM's web browser (shipped with OS/2 Warp 4 … origins unknown)
- BeOS NetPositive (origins unknown)
- QNX Voyager (origins unknown)
- KDE Konqueror (KHTML rendering engine, known today as Webkit)

Of those, Netscape Navigator and KDE Konqueror are the only ones that have descendants in active use that are actually usable with today's world wide web.

@Microplastics101 @Mercutio @librewolf - Microsoft Edge is a fork of Google Chrome/Chromium

Yes, it is that hard.

The modern web runs full blown applications within a sandboxed browser. It's massively complex. Front End (what the user sees) and backend (what does all the heavy computing on the server side).

There *are* efforts to build new browser engines separate from Firefox/Chrome but they are underfunded and understaffed. Its firefox (paid for massively by Google donations) and Google proper. That's it.