Hacker News Reader

Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

I'm already speculating that sooner or later in the future this project will end up pivoting to chromium as the underlying engine.

I can think of two reasons for this

- money is involved and someone buys them out / influences the direction of the project

- the reality of the task ahead sets in the and the dev team gives up on custom engine development

For those of you coming back to this comment from the future, yep "told you so". ;-)

View on HN

Do you think you have a better handle on the "reality of the task" than Kling, who already worked at Apple on WebKit and subsequently got Ladybird to where it is now?

I doubt it. Your prediction might be more appropriate for a project that's in its first week of development, not having been developed for several years and already overcome many difficult hurdles. And if they switch to chromium, there is literally nothing interesting about this project. The fact that it's a novel engine is their only differentiating feature.

The age of the project or the development status of the project does not matter, what matters is the user base.

If you build anything that accumulates users, business interests will be aroused at some point. Business people don't give a shit about the technology itself unless of course the technology itself really is a USP and can be converted into €$. But most people (end users) don't care much about the underlying technology in the browser and whether it's open source or not, chromium or not. Only technologists care.

> The age of the project or the development status of the project does not matter

If you have any evidence to support this, you could become quite well-known for disproving the Lindy effect's applicability to software projects.

It may be hard for you to believe but there are projects not run by "business people".

You really think Google has people running around with suitcases full of money, tempting devs to abandon their own browser engines in favour of chromium?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com