> Porting a modern browser like Firefox or Chromium to an entirely new operating system is arguably as difficult as writing one from scratch
Sadly this sounds quite obvious. But, out of curiosity, does it have to be? Let's imagine we actually write a modern web browser from scratch. Can't we design it the way it would be easy to port to other OSes because it would implement all the actual HTML and CSS features in a platform-independent logic layer on top of a portable renderer layer?
Remember how many platforms did the original Opera support back in the days. I remember running it natively on QNX. And it was the most modern and standard-compliant browser.
Sadly this sounds quite obvious. But, out of curiosity, does it have to be? Let's imagine we actually write a modern web browser from scratch. Can't we design it the way it would be easy to port to other OSes because it would implement all the actual HTML and CSS features in a platform-independent logic layer on top of a portable renderer layer?
Remember how many platforms did the original Opera support back in the days. I remember running it natively on QNX. And it was the most modern and standard-compliant browser.