Ridiculous because it's absolutely guaranteed to fail. Irresponsible because if it does succeed against all odds, the internet will actually become a worse place.If you can't implement most of the web standards (not even all, just most of them), then one of the following will happen:
- your engine will never catch on (best case scenario)
- your engine will be forever known as "this browser where nothing works" and will be perpetually ignored in all discussions about cross-browser compatibility, nullifying any positives that could come from its existence
- worst possible outcome: your engine gains market share, gets treated seriously, and the global development of all new web standards stagnates until you can catch up, which means over a decade of zero innovations.
And you CANNOT implement most web standards[1]. There's too many of them, they all interact with each other too much, the engineering effort required is comparable with rewriting all of Linux from scratch.
And of course there's security. A massive project like that will have massive code complexity, which leads to enormous number of security holes. Chrome and Firefox are mostly secure because their maintainers spent literal decades fixing the holes. They have 20 year headstart over you in making it secure, and they don't have to play catch up with web standards like you do. Everybody using your engine is therefore at a much greater risk of getting hacked than if they sticked with Chrome. And that's assuming you use Rust. If you don't use Rust, then security would be so bad it's not even funny.
None of it matters if you're just making a personal project for the heck of it, of course. Go do it! Have fun! It doesn't matter if you use Rust or not because nobody will use it anyway, so pick whatever tech stack you like the most. Node sounds like a fun choice - it solves the problem of running JS scripts basically for free!
[1] https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...
8/1/2026
at
8:40:48 AM
>and will be perpetually ignored in all discussions about cross-browser compatibilityIf violence doesn't solve your problems, you use not enough violence.
Also if you don't implement web standards, it's doesn't mean that nothing works. Adblock and noscript break web standards, but people use them just fine, they actually make web work better.
>A massive project like that will have massive code complexity, which leads to enormous number of security holes.
Presumably much of that is in network protocols like heartbleed, which has little to do with something like html parsing or google fonts. Also this is in fact a reason for a new browser engine: Chrome and Firefox lost security, because no matter how much they fix, they still have holes.
>If you don't use Rust, then security would be so bad it's not even funny.
Proofs?
by GoblinSlayer
8/1/2026
at
6:29:31 PM
I didn't say nothing would work. I said it'd be known as the one where nothing works. Think: IE6. It implemented like 95% of all web standards as of 2006. But this missing 5% was the difference between being at the forefront of progress and holding back the entire industry.Today, IE6's 95% would be less than 10%. So you'd need to implement several times more features than IE6 had to be even remotely close to the status of unworkable mess that webdevs are better off not supporting.
Low-level exploits like heartbleed are quite rare actually. The vast majority of security bugs in Chrome and Firefox are in unsafely handling edge cases in parsing HTML and other media types, not isolating script execution enough, and bugs in runtime interfaces (cookies, local storage, mic&cam APIs, location APIs, etc.) Realistically, there's no way to avoid these bugs - browser engine has too much inherent complexity, statistically you're bound to mke amistake every so often. Moreover, IIRC about half of those bugs are caused by buffer overflows and similar memory bugs. So by using Rust, you can expect to have half as many security holes than you'd have otherwise. The number is still in the thousands either way.
by Xirdus
8/2/2026
at
7:19:56 PM
FWIW C++ can do bound checks aka hardened STL. On the other hand google did riir some of their programs and removed bound checks there for speed, welcome to real world, so absence of bound checks is not a mistake, but an intended performance goal.
by GoblinSlayer
8/3/2026
at
2:52:58 PM
Google is consciously making Chrome less secure because otherwise the performance is unacceptable. The end result is about 300 CVEs every year for the last 10 years. That's for an almost 20 year old project that had most of its security issues resolved very early on.And you're saying somebody who is not Google can make a brand new browser engine from scratch in 2026, have it perform good enough to be actually usable in practice, and not be an absolute security nightmare?
by Xirdus