I’m not disputing that change happens, but it doesn’t happen as fast as you suggest, or as slow as I’ve seen in the past.

In either case, a small group of developers can maintain an existing code base and add new features to it. I’ve seen it (AND done it) with my own eyes before.

I truly don’t mean to be argumentative, but I have to push back when someone tells me the equivalent of “0% chance of that being possible”, when I know that’s not true (and apologies if I’m misinterpreting what you said, but that’s the impression I’m getting). Agreed, its not 100% possible either, but its closer to 100% than it is 0% possible.

Even for the sake of argument, lets say some “BIG NEW THING ™️” comes along, and the devs don’t have enough resources to implement it. It doesn’t mean the browser dies that very moment in time. There’s plenty of time to migrate to another browser at that point, it takes something along the lines of less than an hour to move from one browser to another (we’re talking personal here, not corporate).

Anyway, I take your point that WHATWG has apparently replaced W3C, and that they move faster. But I’ve also seen allot of products/standards come and go in the name of HTML5 over the years (and even before HTML5, the days of Client/Server, and other coding religions before that) to know that each don’t have to be supported completely on day one, but just the ones that “win” the popularity contests.

One last thing …

In the coming years, building or maintaining a browser engine will be expensive.

If an OS like Linux can be done, and well, so could an open-source codebase inherited browser. An OS is allot harder to maintain than a browser engine is.

Edit: Typo.

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