I do not think it is impossible, Firefox alone has rewritten several of its major components at least once.
I see it more as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a constant stream of FUD from naysayers whenever such a thing is merely suggested (with popular topics being that it will never be finished, it will not be secure, if mozilla needs $500m/year how mere humans will ever be able to do it, etc).
I think that a lot of people nowadays forget that almost much every single piece of open source tech that existed since the 90s or early 2000s was started by naive young programmers trying to do something (have you seen KHTML's source code in KDE1?) without having assholes telling them they can't do it. Well, ok, they had some, but nowadays they are WAY more numerous and at the past they mostly came from (what was seen as) "evil corporations" so they were more easily dismissed. Today most people in open source (both users and programmers) dismiss most things that do not have some big commercial entity behind them.
This seems like a really strange position to fight over. OP is mainly complaining about the constant flux of the spec. At the time were KHTML was being implemented there weren't new features being released every week like we have now. In every aspect of the browser.
As a single developer it is impossible to implement a browser that is compatible with today's websites.
> As a single developer it is impossible to implement a browser that is compatible with today's websites.
Then don't make it "compatible with today's websites".
In fact, that should probably be the goal. That is, what should or could "tomorrow's internet" look like?
Think of the "time lag" between "The Mother of All Demos" and it's actual commercial realization: Arguably the Mac, but some might say the Apple Lisa, other's Xerox Star, and still others could pop their own in the timeline - but for the general consumer - that is "wide adoption" - it was the Mac in 1984.
That's a lag of almost 15 years - but one guy managed to see that future, and with some help, pulled it into the past (if you've never watched the demo, and put yourself in the shoes of that time, then you can't easily understand just what it took for it to occur; it's honestly awe-inspiring to me from a historical standpoint, I'm sure there were people in the audience who didn't understand they were seeing the future).
Try to do that, is what I'd propose.
And some people are. Where I believe that future lives is in the idea of the "distributed web" - which honestly is what the internet should have been all along, but apparently we're going to have to drag it back there. Part of the reason it didn't go that route was mainly because of "dial-up access" - the end nodes weren't looked at as "peers", when they should have been, just instead of "always-on" peers, as "ephemeral and temporary" peers. But they were kinda sold differently, and most people weren't made aware that they could be (and should be) peers. But rather, relegated to 2nd class "clients" and "consumers".
Now many people have the available bandwidth to be closer to real peers, run servers, etc - but are instead limited in a variety of ways (most notably by draconian TOS language, that while in many cases is "ignored" - it can be easily dragged out to deny service if and when an ISP feels like it).
I'm not sure the distributed web is the full answer (the full answer would include mesh networks - but there are logistical issues there with those, especially in the United States, that currently prevent them from transitioning beyond, at maximum, "city level") - but it's a start, I think.
> At the time were KHTML was being implemented there weren't new features being released every week like we have now. In every aspect of the browser.
KHTML was being implemented in 1999. That was an extremely fast moving and chaotic time in the development of the web! Browsers were shipping new features left and right, the specs didn't describe at all what browsers really did, and if you fell behind people would quickly switch to other browsers.
Even by 1999 you wouldn't have been able to make a competitive browser on your own, and especially not keep up with the rate of change.
(In the early 2000s, after Microsoft "won the first browser war" and disbanded the IE group, everything slowed way down, though.)
I see it more as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a constant stream of FUD from naysayers whenever such a thing is merely suggested (with popular topics being that it will never be finished, it will not be secure, if mozilla needs $500m/year how mere humans will ever be able to do it, etc).
I think that a lot of people nowadays forget that almost much every single piece of open source tech that existed since the 90s or early 2000s was started by naive young programmers trying to do something (have you seen KHTML's source code in KDE1?) without having assholes telling them they can't do it. Well, ok, they had some, but nowadays they are WAY more numerous and at the past they mostly came from (what was seen as) "evil corporations" so they were more easily dismissed. Today most people in open source (both users and programmers) dismiss most things that do not have some big commercial entity behind them.