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Comment by senfiaj | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.

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"even Microsoft" is an oxymoron. Microsoft is exactly the entity I would expect to fail at implementing complex standards.

You didn´t understand

Why the insult with no explanation?

I did not insult

Oh, sorry, in English your wording appears insulting. What don't I understand?

I think OP didn´t mean the "real" web standars (W3C) but what Google rules that is the actual standars in practice. Edge had to move from his own rendering engine to blink (crhomium) because of that. So "even" Microsoft could not fight that trend. Sorry for my english.

Right, I see what you mean. It's not entirely Microsoft's fault - I'm just taking a shot at them.

Your English seemed perfectly clear to me, for what it's worth. We just have a tendency to read things in a negative tone for some reason - one of those human bugs :).

I don't think this is helpful if somebody is trying to learn English subtleties. Responding to a person's thought with "You don't understand", and that's it, implies hostility/rudeness.

People tend to read certain things with a negative tone because people tend to write certain things with a negative tone. That kind of pattern recognition is fundamental to language, not a regrettable quirk. Otherwise "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about" would be equivalent to "I think you might have misunderstood".

I had to double check to make sure I responded to the right person after seeing this pop up in my replies summary :D. One way to perk up during morning coffee!

I'm sorry you feel "you didn't understand" has a similar range of interpretation as something like "you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about". I'm not sure I can help with that, I can only say this is not the interpretation of every native English speaker. If anything, the split in views should hopefully help convey English often cares about context and the audience over a singular meaning for a set of words (though I don't think that's particularly unique to English).

You're wrong!

[I'm sure you won't have any desire for me to explain my position and will regard this interaction positively.]

Servo exists, and it's making steady progress: https://servo.org/

How old is Servo? 14? I just opened waspdev.com and the UI was quite broken. It can't even render a basic blog normally.

Works for me? I clicked on a few games even.

The only brokenness is misalignment of text on the tag cloud. I took a glance, and it has the content marked as scrollable with the min-height of 0, height of 20 and line-height of 24. I have no idea what _is_ the correct behavior in this case.

The html lists in the articles were not ok, the top bar search input as well. Chrome and FF were rendering fine.

Ladybird is steadily progressing: https://ladybird.org/

The last time I checked the source code, it was filled with horrible unsafe C++. They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.

Aren’t Chrome and Firefox also filled with “horrible unsafe C++”?

Yup. But they had thousands of engineers working on them for a decade.

Doesnt that makes it even less consistent ?

Why? C++ is horrible, but when you have thousands of developers, you can make it work.

> It was filled with horrible unsafe C++

Are you saying their code was horrible and unsafe, or just that its a byproduct of using C++. They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....

> They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.

No they don't. SerenityOS did, and that was the goal of the project. But Ladybird has plenty of third party libraries.

> Are you saying their code was horrible and unsafe, or just that its a byproduct of using C++.

Yes.

It's both terrible because it's C++, and it's terrible because they're not following the modern C++ safe coding practices.

> They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....

And it's not going to amount to anything major. Rewriting in Rust properly requires architecting things from the beginning.

> No they don't.

For a long time, their policy had been "no third-party code". Eventually it became untenable, so they started using third-party libraries. But they still ended up reinventing the wheel at least several times.

I will believe it when I see it. Still no public release.

the source is public, you can just compile it

Microsoft didn't fail, they made a business decisions to reduce costs.

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