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403 points jaytaph | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

Last year I wrote a post about trying to make a change in the world by writing a browser.

Today, we're excited to introduce Gosub, a new open-source browser engine that we are building from the ground up in Rust!

Gosub aims to be a modern, modular, and highly flexible browser engine. While still in the early development and experimentation phase, Gosub is shaping up nicely, and we’re looking to onboard more contributors to help us bring this project to life.

Some of the key highlights:

  * Written in Rust: We're leveraging Rust's safety and performance features to create a robust and efficient engine.
  * Modular Design: The project is organized around modules, allowing for clean separation of concerns and easier collaboration. It also allows us to easily swap components based on needs and allows more freedom for engine implementers in the future.
  * Collaborative and open source: We’re building Gosub with the intention of making it approachable and open to contributions, aiming to create a project that's easier to understand and collaborate on compared to existing browsers.
Instead of writing another shell around Chromium or WebKit, we decided to write a browser engine from scratch. We believe that having a diverse landscape of engines is the only way to defeat a monoculture that is currently threatening current browsers and by extension the internet itself. We cannot and should not let a very small number of large companies dictate the future of the web and its usage.

With Gosub, we're aiming to build something more approachable that can evolve with the latest web technologies, all while being open to contributors from day one.

We’re looking for developers with or without experience in Rust. You just need to be interested in browser technologies. There are plenty of opportunities to work on core modules, document our progress, and help shape the project's direction.

We can already render simple pages, including the hackernews front page. However, to render most sites correctly, it is still a long journey, so come and join us!

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johnwbyrd ◴[] No.41840616[source]
Yes, but I'm concerned about the number of existing browser engines that have fallen by the wayside, as the project founders have become exhausted. The scope of such a project is incredibly easy to underestimate, and it has only ever gotten larger.

Some examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/124kphe/what_do_y...

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zamadatix ◴[] No.41840901[source]
Servo and Ladybird are more active than ever, each having fresh funding and ramping up focused development. Flow is a commercial project for embedded media devices (not just available on rpi, it actually came there later) and seems to be doing well? Sciter I don't know one way or the other about, it seems to have a few popular apps using it but I don't know if it died off since then or is just going strong. Netsurf has always been a bit by the wayside but it doesn't seem like founders getting exhausted has much to do with that.

There are plenty of browser engines that have fallen by the wayside, often for reasons unrelated to the founders, but that particular list actually paints a surprising amount of the opposite to me. For once since Chrome came out (it at least introduced v8 even if it started with webkit) I have the feeling there are browsers engines in development that can actually attempt to load the modern web and will actually have products for general use cases (instead of specialized ones) in the coming years.

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1. throwup238 ◴[] No.41841443[source]
I wouldn’t call Sciter a browser engine. The CSS syntax is similar and some properties behave the same, but it doesn’t implement web standards by design.