Maybe it's the curmudgeon in me, but while I salute the ingenuity in this UI/UX idea, I think we need a new kind of browser engine at least as much as a new kind of browser interface, perhaps more.

I used to worry that WebKit would eat the world, for awhile Trident did eat the world, and now I worry about Blink.

Maybe you should take a look at Servo from Mozilla: https://servo.org/

A few things from Servo were integrated in Firefox 57. But the project is far from complete I think.

I'm aware of Servo. Servo is neat to play with, though it's pretty bad with older legacy HTML pages. Also, I'm not sure how likely Mozilla is to develop it into a product; it seems more like a testbed for later Gecko evolution (which, to be sure, is still a good thing).

Firefox already includes parts of Servo, so it’s not a question of “how likely” it is to be used in production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_(Mozilla)

> so it’s not a question of “how likely” it is to be used in production.

I believe you misunderstood the comment unless it was changed. The commenter questioned the likelihood of it being developed into a product and you responded as of they had questioned the likelihood of any of it being used in production.

Fwiw, I agree with the commenter and am unsure how likely Mozilla is to develop it into a product. They do seem to incorporate pieces though.

I think you and the commenter share some misunderstanding. Could you distinguish what you mean by developing Servo into a product vs. “incorporating pieces”?

Are you saying that Mozilla eventually replacing Gecko’s style system, DOM, compositor, and networking system with Servo’s (as the article I linked describes) is just incorporating “pieces” of Servo?

The product that Mozilla is developing Servo into is Firefox. I don’t know what you expect—for Mozilla to replace Gecko with Servo all at once? For Mozilla to do the same thing they are doing now but just give it a new name?

> Could you distinguish what you mean by developing Servo into a product vs. “incorporating pieces”?

Do you remember seeing screenshots of "servo"? Running a Servo executable (or browserhtml or whatever) is/was a thing. It was branded as being developed as an alternative browser to FF. It was even using cannibalizing FF pieces (e.g. Spider Monkey) not the other way around.

> The product that Mozilla is developing Servo into is Firefox. I don’t know what you expect—for Mozilla to replace Gecko with Servo all at once? For Mozilla to do the same thing they are doing now but just give it a new name?

That is the case now, though they have names for the pieces, the name "Servo" still seems to be the name of the full browser (coopted by the VR group IIRC). It was what everyone expected to not necessarily replace FF all at once, but be developed alongside as an alternative. This history was clear, the name Servo as a whole browser was clear, and the misunderstanding is pretending that was not the case.

Servo is a browser engine, not some VR project (where the heck did you get that? Go to https://github.com/servo/servo ); what’s more, Firefox is “Servo as a whole browser,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Of course you are able to run Servo “by itself,” how the heck do you expect Servo developers to be able to test their browser engine?

I’m not sure what weird dramatization of history you are trying to create, but it’s all the more bizarre in that (1) this all happened in the open, so you should easily be able to see what you are saying is and was simply not the case, and in that (2) far from Servo being killed, it is the future of Firefox, so what on earth is there to be upset about? This has been surreal; good luck.