First sentence, last sentence, skip the rest.

Netsurf uses its own renderer.

Yes, there are three engines since 20 years

If, and only if, you skip NetSurf’s own one and Dillo’s own one and the numerous text-mode engines like GNU Emacs’s one, w3m et cetera, this number might be close to the whole truth. But I don’t see why you would do that.

Awesome, thank you. It was even installed on my system!

Maybe because it’s already old enough to not be “cool” anymore. Anyway, one of the reasons why I keep mentioning it is to reverse this noise.

Which is a less portable, less complete implementation of this one.

I am excited to see a new competitor

I wish more people would help NetSurf development instead of joining the Ladybird bandwagon. Ladybird is basically a less portable, less complete NetSurf.

But a browser engine is an absurdly huge piece of software and it will be a miracle if projects like Rust (or Ladybird, which I just learned it’s targeting its first alpha for… 2026!) get backed by big corporations and their pace gets quicker.

NetSurf already does everything that Ladybird promises - and it has done that for years. Just saying.

this is why there are only three engines out there

No.

I like that the developer actually supports systems without Docker. I wish that would be more common these days.

I wish someone would develop a tool that would allow me to remove the annoying foreground noise from podcasts ;-)

Ah, the joys of using “standard” software.

Same

If your goal is to ever talk to people about open source software, that’s going to create a lot of unnecessary confusion.

I guess that my definition of open source is not that uncommon, given that the terms “free software” and “libre software” exist and are rather well-established by this point.

People often use the OSI’s Open Source Definition when using the term “open source”.

Which is one of the possible definitions. Mine is “you can see the code”. Everything else falls into “free software”.

I think the new one remains closed. Sadly, not locked away.

What is “actually open source”, if “here’s the source code” is not?

You can make embarrassing mistakes in virtually any programming language that’s not too esoteric.

When I still used Python for prototyping (today, I usually use Go for that), it happened much too often that I did this:

if foo:
    bar()
   foobar() # syntax error

In Lisp, however, both errors are much harder to make (not even considering GNU Emacs’s superb auto-indentation - which is what most Lispers use these days, as far as I know):

(when foo)  ;; <- obvious!
    (bar))

(when foo
    (bar)
          (foobar)  ;; <- still valid
(quux))  ;; <- also still valid

Dynamic typing is the source of very amazing errors, see JavaScript.

Feel free, it’s still out there!