POpolyglotfacto·Jan 25, 2026
> The question then becomes who would fund such a thing
Historically new web engines came about when a new challenger wanted to have a stake in web standards development. The way it happened was never from scratch but with a fork of an existing engine. Last time this happened was with Google. The reason, I think, was wanting to evolve the web into an application-like platform(HTML5), and a new architectural idea: multi-process.
The person who was in charge of that effort is now at OpenAI.
Today there are also projects like Ladybird and Servo which follow a different model: started from scratch and driven by interest from a developer community. But so far neither has users in the real-world, and so they haven't had an impact on the Web in the way Chromium has, yet.
Already today, both development models could benefit from the productivity
Read the rest
gains of AI; in 2029 the game may have changed entirely. I can imagine a combination of math(TLA+ like I've done at https://github.com/w3c/IndexedDB/pull/484), web standard in their semi-formal English, and then some further guidance in terms of code architecture(through a conversation-like iterative loop), and see a Fastrender-like approach that actually works. Humans would still be the ones defining and solving all the hard problems, but you'd be typing a whole lot less code...
I'm the one who was driving the efforts to start experimenting with AI in Servo, which was cut short by https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379
I've been using AI on side-projects ever since, and in those I don't type any code by hand anymore and end-up doing things I would not even contemplate(due to time constraints) without the use of AI.
Example: https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/tla-in-support-of-ai-c...