> Even the simplest possible 1995-esque browser will have to deal with that (support for images was added in 1993, and text and networking were always central).

Indeed they did. Here's what author of KHTML said, https://twitter.com/LarsKnoll/status/1421121639845187585

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Implementing a browser engine from scratch was a lot of work in 1999/2000, it’s close to impossible today.

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