Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers.
Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood.
It's like the difference between making a Linux distro and maintaining a full OS.
My reasoning is that Google's investment is massive and just because they're throwing money and people at a problem doesn't make it necessary for everyone else to do so as well.
Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers." WebGL stack? WebRTC? Layout engine/compositor? Notifications? You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
WebKit is a bad example, considering the KHTML history alone. These things don't just take devpower, but time - consider, for example, this: http://www.ekioh.com/flow
From what I understand, that team is relatively small in comparison, but actually does have this widely-ish deployed. So it theoretically could be done with less... but it's still insane to even consider. This isn't simple, and anyone who's trying to imply otherwise is wrong.
The other commentator you're responding with also never discloses they worked with Apple previously, while pretty much endlessly pumping up their work here. shrug
I was aware of Ekioh, but only tangentially; I had no idea of their progress so I didn't bring it up. I'd say it's great that they've managed to come this far. And to clarify if it wasn't plain from my other comments, I think that Chrome is the exception rather than the rule: it's an absolutely massive team. Possibly the largest of all the browser vendors that can make something close to compatible with the modern web. When pressed for an example I mentioned WebKit because just happened to be the by far the best example: it's the one that I could point to as competing with Gecko or Blink, plus it had a nice webpage I could link to instead of making people comb through Git commits.
> You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
https://webkit.org/team/, ⌘F "Apple". Balance the people on that list who have left or are assigned to work on something else with those who aren't listed there.
And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla?
FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?
Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern browser. This applies to Chrome, Firefox and even old good IE. I don't expect any valid reasons why the same logic cannot apply to Safari.
The number above is probably pretty close, but there's a misconception that WebKit is only a tiny fraction of Safari: it's not. Most of the manpower and work goes into it; Safari is just chrome around it (albeit chrome that does take a reasonable amount of work to make…just not as much as it does to support JavaScript and WebAssembly VMs, page styling, rendering, WebGL and WebGPU, networking, tracking prevention, and maintaining support for the the ever-growing list of web standards WebKit supports and participating in discussions on shaping them). Safari is just one of the clients of WebKit.
