Note that this appears to be yet another Webkit shell, and not an implementation of parsing/rendering pages in Lisp.
Eventually we would like to make our own web-renderer, but we recognize that it is a lot of work, and a bit away
OK, looking through the README in the ports/ directory, I see this:
> Next is made of two programs:
> The Lisp core which offers the user full control over the browsing. It’s 100% Common Lisp.
> The “platform port”, which only purpose is to display a window with two components: the minibuffer and the web view.
> The two parts communicate via D-Bus, an RPC system. The Lisp core sends a D-Bus request to the platform port (for example, “open this URL”); the platform port acts upon it and sends a D-Bus response back to the Lisp core.
So you've put the WebKit stuff into another process, but your browser is WebKit based, unless I completely misunderstood what I just read. You couldn't use Next to drive Firefox, for example, without some interesting re-writes on the Firefox end.
(Just to make it abundantly clear: I think this is a really neat hack and a good way to separate concerns, but the way you phrased things confused me until I dug into the README you linked to and read some source code.)
Of course, writing a text-based browser in Lisp or any other language is far simpler but also less practical.
Emacs has a few; the included one is called “ewww”, and is pretty nice if you’re into emacs already.
But it’s already a lot more than a “Webkit shell”, e. g. see https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next/blob/master/source/re...
(what-is-p wrong (with 'that))
More seriously, there's also the security angle with browser, that using an independently developed engine has certain advantages.