[zelcon]

Why didn't you just fork Chromium and strip out the renderer? This is guaranteed to bitrot when the web standards change unless you keep up with it forever and have perpetual funding. Yes, modifying Chromium is hard, but this seems harder.

[fbouvier]

It was my first idea. Forking Chromium has obvious advantages (compatibility). But it's not architectured for that. The renderer is everywhere. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it did look more difficult to me than starting over.

And starting from scratch has other benefits. We own the codebase and thus it's easier for us to add new features like LLM integrations. Plus reducing binary size and startup time, mandatory for embedding it (as a WASM module or as C lib).

[oever]

The Chromium/Webkit renderer used to have multiple rendering backends. You might use or add a no-op backend.

[cxr]

> modifying Chromium is hard, but this seems harder

Prove it.

[tetris11]

Why do anything: because it shows what's possible, and makes the next effort that much more easier.

I call this process of frontier effort and discovery: "science"

[zelcon]

Redoing what others have already done is not what I think of when I hear "frontier effort"