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Comment by 1oooqooq | Hacker News Reader

You can tell they are a fly by night meme enterprise for not starting from a Mozilla fork.

Be realistic. For all bad mozilla foundation/corporation/toppahs did, the code is still open source and relatively free. If even something called IceWeasel almost had a shot at forking, the bar is pretty low.

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That's what I don't quite get. I'm really wary of a "from scratch" web browser at this point. I looked at their project and their main selling point is that they're building both the rendering engine and the JS runtime from scratch "Driven by a web standards first approach" - what exactly does that mean? Firefox has always had that approach and web standards are more complex than they've ever been. I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.

We're talking decades of features they have to support - unless they're planning on strategically dropping support for older unused/deprecated parts of the standard? Even in 2008 Google made the decision to use Webkit for their browser because they understood what an enormous undertaking it would be to write their own rendering engine. That was 16 years ago.

> I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.

Th selling point is to have multiple implementations of browser engines. Currently we have three (gecko, webkit and blink, where blink is based on webkit and webkit is based on khtml). If you consider how much of the modern world is based on browsing standards it seems pretty self-evident to not have it depend on a few corporations.

Bun is a wrapper around JavaScriptCore (the JS engine used for webkit just like v8 is used for blink or node), so not at all an independent JS runtime and is not at all a browser.

> We're talking decades of features they have to support

If this is proven not to work because the standard has grow too big as you imply then we should absolutely look into either dropping old standards or slowing the pace we introduce new standards. This project is a litmus test for the web.

Andreas has been doing this for a long time. The difference is that now he is openly shifting focus from the OS to the browser.

Having a fully new codebase implementing the web is a great thing.

IceWeasel was a completely different thing mainly based around mozilla trademarks for logos/names that clashed with the FOSS policies of linux distros when shipping non-upstream binaries.

He is great and the project is awesome. But please, do tell me the goal of serenityOS?

I think it was meant to be a recovery project first, hobby second, community third. Then ladybird started showing more potential so his focus shifted there.

Sorry if I don't understand what you meant to ask.

A unix like os with user interface from the windows 2000 era that he could use as his daily driver at some point (instead of Linux). He said as much in some podcast I can't remember (probably cppcast).

No. He said it was occupational therapy. The goal was relaxed coding, not achieving anything at all.

Seriously, why isn't there a legitimate Mozilla fork we can fund instead? There are a lot of addons that will take decades to emulate, like Sidebery, the main reason I switched to Firefox and am staying on cool until a good fundable Firefox fork (like Vivaldi for Chromium).

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