Three if you count Webkit/Safari

Pfft. I'm going back to the og Netscape Navigator 😎

It feels very weird to say but

I think maybe

the world was better when Trident existed??

Why even make a desktop app at this point? I get doing that if it has some inherent advantage over the web version, but why go through the trouble of making another program if it's just gonna be the same but in electron?

Why I dislike web apps. They make the devs lazy enough to not bother making a native app

Vivaldi contains Chromium, but it isn't itself open-source, by the way.

They say of themselves that "for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit". I would not fully agree with that either, but I guess, at that point the open-source purists have already lost interest anyways.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-source/

It's still the same rendering engine. There are two browsers.

It's possible. But it's a huge undertaking. If you just wanted to fully understand all of the specifications for HTTP, JavaScript and CSS, it'd take you days before having written a single line of code.

Then you need to write all that in a performant way.

Then you need to keep up with all the new features.

Then you need to keep up with all the new security threats.

Browsers nowadays are practically little operating systems. So the question is not that far off from asking what prevents you from writing an alternative to Windows.

You can. But it'll cost millions, or maybe billions, to build something good.

Probably the fact that you could work for the rest of your life and never catch up to the current spec. It's enormous, and they're adding more things faster than you could ever keep up with.

Even MS couldn't be bothered any more, and that's a $3 trillion business.

Which is why there's only three browser engines in any kind of use.

Because they're giant applications that do a lot under the hood that you don't see. Of course you can write your own, we did that during my degree but it was extremely basic.

a program like any other that just needs to be able to access each websites’ server and display its files right?

In software engineering "just" is often considered a dirty word.

Rendering HTML and CSS correctly is not trivial.

Doing JavaScript to spec also is not trivial.

Doing all your http verb network request stuff is also not trivial.

Plus the interface (probably graphical) is a lot of work.

There's also probably a thousand other things that would eat up time. Displaying all the different image formats, for example.

The main thing is technical nuances, and a never ending list of them.

But you could start with something like lynx or elinks, but at that point you may as well just use lynx or elinks.

Vivaldi is chromium