> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up.

It's interesting how the history goes.

We had Netscape 4, and it was crap (remember when resizing a window reloaded the whole page?)

So they was a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine, resulting in Gecko, which was put in Mozilla.

Gecko was great but Mozilla was a bloaty amalgamation of features, so this was created a pared-down Gecko version called...

~Phoenix~ ~Firebird~ Firefox, which had the great rendering engine and a lean, native-like UI.

Then there was KHTML/KJS which was built for KDE, which had a lean architecture but didn't have the investment to get the compatibility 100% there...

Which Apple then poured into the project in their fork to WebKit, which paid off in spades on the resource-limited iPhone a couple years later.

But Safari was only on the Mac (aside from their "Cocoa on Windows" version and a few open source ports), which Google took as a reason to create...

Google Chrome, where the biggest innovation was rendering each page in its own process (since Safari could freeze up due to one page going in an infinite loop in JavaScript).

So will someone out-Firefox Firefox and do what Chrome was to Safari for multi-processing? Take the rendering engine and put a new chrome on top of it?