It is crazy. And maybe it could be distilled down, but maybe because of what it's become and how it's used, that's just not an option anymore. The context is that the "web" that browsers are browsing has grown from mere rich text and links into basically a fully networked and distributed operating system. There are entire software suites that exist only through web protocols now. Literally anything you used to be able to do on a Desktop OS you can now do directly on the web, often at very close to bare metal performance levels. And over the years and decades the standards have evolved to not just enable that anymore but to actually require that level of functionality. It has become completely expected to have javascript APIs allowing extensive and instantaneous DOM manipulation, HTML5 canvas and storage, WebSocket and WebGL available, they're not just "optional addons" you can pull in with an extension or that a text based browser might not bother to implement, they're a core part of the web and very little will be functional without them.

So when you're building a "modern" web browser what you're effectively really doing is implementing an entire cross-platform OS, sandboxed and virtualized for security within any host OS you choose to support.

Of course technically "the web" is still backwards compatible with the old pure HTML, no javascript, no CSS, web 1.0. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing such a simple site today, and those websites are still out there. And that's still sort of where you have to start with projects like Servo, because that's just the basic level of absolute minimum functionality. But it's taken a long time to build all the features of the modern web and so of course it's going to take a long time for a new browser engine to implement all of them or even enough of them to actually start supporting the most commonly used websites.

While there are definitely a lot of quirks related to handling old sites and the various inconsistencies and incompatibilities that developed over the years, I don't think that's the real sticking point on developing a new web engine at this point. I think the issue is simply the fact that the web does so much and is such a comprehensive technology platform, and if you tried to simplify it, to make it easier to develop browsers, you would lose a lot of actually important functionality for developing websites that allow them to do the things they are doing today. Granted some of those things I wouldn't mind losing either, but a lot of them are legitimately required for what we do with the web now and what we expect it to be able to do.

That's pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol). You can explore it through an HTTP proxy like this: https://portal.mozz.us/

The Gemini Protocol does a good job at being a minimal alternative, but it's quite limited in what is capable. It'll never be adequate for banking or video games.

Social media and reddit alternatives? No problem.

There are gopher browsers that allow you to visit an alternative, more simple "web"

All major browser engines are FOSS.

Chrome and Edge are proprietary wrappers around Chromium (BSD license). Firefox and derivatives are FOSS (Mozilla Public License). Safari is built around WebKit (LGPL/BSD).

The problem, however, is governance. These projects are all too big for anyone to realistically fork and maintain independently. So in practice, they are under control of Google, Mozilla, and Apple — all of which have questionable priorities (especially Google).

Chrome is mostly open-source software, Chromium builds are just missing Google data sync, some video DRM, and other proprietary components. I believe Firefox is completely FOSS.

Why would it? FOSS doesn't have the funding that commercial software does.

Oh God please let something related to it be called crow

Nice, I'll add that to the to-do list.

Firefox is already made in rust though. only sorts it seems. They were founding members though that's the part I remembered.

how long is a piece of string?

sorry. browsers are insanely complex pieces of software. like, operating system level. the standard has grown enough that the web is it's own platform. so your definition of "daily use" is what is important; servo can open web pages, render html and css, and store cookies. it can also do some javascript. that's enough to deal with like 80% of all websites ever written... but not the ones non-technical people use like facebook and twitter.

there's also the matter of what features you actually require: tabs were not a standard feature for the first fifteen or so years of the web. search in the url bar was seen as an antipattern at first and wasn't included. credential storage (like password autofill) wasn't added until like 20 years in.

Not yet but at least it can display something!! I always read that it was a monumental effort to build one and now we have something.

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird

Ladybird!

There's an interesting talk by the founder: https://youtu.be/9YM7pDMLvr4