@halva gecko being hostile to embedding/developing new UIs is a big one for me (I really miss pentadactyl, which can't be properly implemented with as a webextension, and I'd like to be able to experiment in other fields) chromium is slightly better in that regard, but still not a very good base because ultimately google can fuck it up and make it significantly harder for downstreams to do nice things webkit is much lower level afaik
in terms of browsers that aren't a chrome or firefox fork there aren't really any decent choices anything that implements its own rendering engine is missing too many features to be usable, and otherwise for the most part all you see is copying the same design paradigms as mainstream browsers qutebrowser looks nice but its ad blocking system is very primitive and it doesn't support standard extensions so no ubo, it's a non-starter
also as a novel browser engine, unlike servo ladybird aims closer to what I'd like to see (shedding some complexity by eg making it an explicit non-goal to implement a javascript JIT)
@novenary@halva really do hope google ends up spinning chromium out into an independent foundation. As it is, the development priorities are way too skewed towards Google's priorities (like Manifest V3 cripping adblocking, etc).
In terms of Gecko, I'm kinda skeptical about its future as well. Mozilla's been relying on Google money for a long time now, but the antitrust stuff might cause that to stop soon. Doesn't help that it's been mismanaged for a while now too.
Webkit might be what I'd go for if I was making a new browser today, but it does lag behind a bit in terms of standards compliance. Though to be fair, a lot of that has been driven by the Chromium group these days so maybe that's not as big of a downside...?
@halva@novenary dunno too much about how ladybird and servo are these days though. Last I heard servo was kinda on life support, but I guess that's starting to change.
