[theunspoken]

I am very fed up with standards lacking a free and open reference implementation. It's very easy to produce a specification for embedding 3D models into a browser, but who is going to follow up with and actual complying browser?

The big guys, that's who.

Google, Microsoft, Apple can just throw piles and piles of money at the problem; but what about everyone else? What about Firefox? What about Palemoon? What about Falkon?

When the AV1 codec came about one of the first thing provided was the reference implementation (AOMenc), same with Wayland. Not the most performant, not the lightest on resources, but at least it followed the protocol.

W3C and alike though don't seem to like this perspective. Why can't we have an average performing BSD-licensed W3C-compliant web browser? Just as a last resort if you just want to use something that is sure to work, or maybe the first browser you can port to a new architecture or OS to get things going.

[comex]

Google and Apple's engines are open source (and Microsoft now contributes to Google's). What would be the benefit of a separate reference implementation of this standard? I suppose it would be easier to port to other browsers if it were designed as a standalone library rather than tightly integrated into an engine. But the idea of going to pains to design a standalone library seems to contradict your later statement that you want an entire reference browser.

A web browser is orders of magnitude more complex than a video encoder or a Wayland server. Not aiming for high performance would make a browser a little less complex, but not by much, so there doesn't seem to be much point. Minus that, you're just asking for someone (who?) to write a new web browser from scratch. It would certainly be nice if there were more independent web browser codebases in general, but I don't see what special benefit a new one would bring to the table just due to being marked as a "reference implementation".