Ladybird sure thinks they are going to.
I’m curious how successful they will be.
I’m curious how successful they will be.
Today, all the money for this comes from only two companies in the world: Apple and Google (since Mozilla's main source of income is its deal with Google, we have three widely used rendering engines, but the money really comes from two companies).
Now what's interesting about Ladybird is it's this big pile of BSD licensed code that looks like it would be a good start if you wanted to build a fourth engine.
Is there someone out there who has a lot of money and a reason they would want to spend it on developing another engine? I.e. they don't want their fate owned by Apple/Google or the existing engines are somehow inadequate for their needs? This is the really interesting question.
I just got a built in to the browser pop-up add a few weeks ago from Mozilla about a VPN product... sheesh.
Nothing stops a new project (eg Brave) from implementing a new browser based on an existing engine. And you even have 3 big mature engines to choose from (gecko, website and blink).
The engine is responsible for the HTML, CSS and JavaScript support, which is the bit everyone seems concerned about re standards.
The wrapper around that engine is significant - and where most of the complaints actually seem to lie. Built in popups, tracking, phoning home etc.
I'm not sure we need another engine. By contrast there are quite a few browsers to choose from built on those engines.
Building a new -browser- is "easy". Building a new engine is "hard" (and would be very expensive to keep current.)
Incidentally 90% is likely useless. 99% -might- be enough, depending on which 1% is missing.