Why not just fork Firefox? IIRC there are already several actively-developed forks.
Sustainability wise, Firefox is not built for hackers. One example is the Haiku community has been working on porting Firefox for years, to varying degrees of success. The problem is that it's just so huge; there are so many things going on, so many libraries that each require porting efforts on their own, DRM standards built into the core platform that will likely never see support, so real "Firefox" is likely to never happen regardless of community effort.
Meanwhile, though it is in a quite early state, multiple people are already experimenting with their own working builds of Ladybird on Haiku.
I'm not trying to say I can guarantee this will continue being the case as the ladybird project reaches maturity, but I think they deserve an honest shot. Wouldn't it be nice to have a truly portable browser engine?
Plus, I don't see how Firefox is really broken. Right now, forking and shipping with a custom user.js is sufficient to fix most annoyances.
Chrome: 70% of all security bugs are memory safety issues: https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-70-of-all-security-bugs...
"Rust is an emerging programing language that aims at preventing memory-safety bugs without sacrificing much efficiency. The claimed property is very attractive to developers, and many projects start using the language. However, can Rust achieve the memory-safety promise? This paper studies the question by surveying 186 real-world bug reports collected from several origins which contain all existing Rust CVEs (common vulnerability and exposures) of memory-safety issues by 2020-12-31. We manually analyze each bug and extract their culprit patterns. Our analysis result shows that Rust can keep its promise that all memory-safety bugs require unsafe code...": https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03296
Seems persuasive to me.
How so?
> Rust is not really a factor (either way) when I'm deciding whether or not to use a particular piece of software.
For a five function calculator or alarm clock app, sure. Browsers have an immense attack surface, handle incredible amounts of untrusted data in hundreds of different formats, and are actively exploited regularly.
Cloudflare reports almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious: https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudflare-reports-almost-7-pe...
Software which is expected to deal with such hostilities and complexities needs to be written in memory safe languages in 2024.
Wayland's been in the works for well over a decade now and many Linux distros still haven't switched over yet. I don't think this is a great example.