[furi]

Rust is definitely a significant and important project. That said, Firefox's peak market share was a little over 30% of desktop browsers (in 2009 so they weren't yet a sideshow), while Rust isn't even currently in the TIOBE Index top 20 (can't find any easy way to see a peak position sadly).

More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.

[kubb]

Could you name these six Rust competitors please?

[furi]

I'm thinking of Crystal, Nim, Zig, Odin and (ignoring that the topic at hand is avoiding Google having unnecessary control over things) Go. I'm aware they may not share Rust's exact feature set; Crystal is the only one I've used, including Rust itself. That comment was intended to illustrate that this is a field where attempts are made regularly and manage to achieve some measure of success, relative to browser rendering engines where I am only aware of a single (proprietary, incomplete) attempt in recent years: Flow.