Browser Engine Competition

Comments discuss the extreme difficulty and cost of developing new browser engines, the dominance of Chromium/Blink leading to a monoculture, and desires for more competition and independent alternatives like Firefox or Servo.

➡️ Stable 0.7x Web Development
5,104
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#8012
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Keywords

FF paulirish.com CSS OP JIT OSS WebKit NS JavaScript HTML browser engine webkit browsers engines blink chromium web mozilla firefox

Sample Comments

notatcomputer68 Jan 14, 2019 View on HN

It's a reminder that browsers are such huge beasts that no one can viable fork them when they feel the browsers are regressing.

boomboomsubban Sep 24, 2022 View on HN

Building and maintaining a full browser isn't cheap, if it were there'd be more browser engines.

MaxBarraclough Mar 18, 2020 View on HN

I don't think anyone will try. It's 'impossible' in the sense that both Microsoft and Opera threw in the towel and turned their browsers into Chromium skins. If even Microsoft can't pull it off, it seems unlikely anyone else is going to seriously try starting afresh.Mozilla have been successful in swapping out large chunks of their browser for superior replacements (for instance replacing the JIT, several times iirc), but that's not quite the same thing.Anothe

samrus Jul 9, 2025 View on HN

anything but chromium forks. i want real competition in the browser engine space

PaulHoule Nov 17, 2022 View on HN

Why not invest in a competitive web browser?

nechuchelo Nov 4, 2025 View on HN

If they were happy with using an existing browser engine, they wouldn't be writing one from scratch

merlinscholz Jan 21, 2021 View on HN

Sadly, browser engines have become complicated enough, that an unfunded open source project is unsustainable after some time. In my opinion, Brave offers a new attempt to solve this (and other) problems with the modern web. I understand that not everybody likes this business model, but I think everybody has to decide on its own, which browser they want to use. After all, browser diversity is important.

rydre Jun 22, 2020 View on HN

Now only if they allow competing browser engine...

roschdal May 1, 2025 View on HN

What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser development?

batiudrami Aug 12, 2016 View on HN

This seems like quite a niche feature to build and market a browser around.