[sglane]

>Chrome was developed by different teams with different expertises, some of them acquired from other companies.

To expand on this, Chrome and Safari use webkit as their rendering/layout engine which is a fork of KDE's KHTML. IE came from NCSA Mosaic-> Spyglass -> Microsoft IE.

To be clear on my suggestions below, let's clarify what a browser actually is. The browser manages things like the navigation bar, bookmarks, download/mime handling, etc. This is known as the "chrome" or GUI. The layout engine handles HTML parsing, rendering, possibly is coupled with a Javascript engine like V8.

If you are trying to write a browser, the answer is to use webkit2 in whatever language you like. It's fast, light, and portable. If you are trying to write a layout engine (rendering engine), do as another poster suggested and write one to target HTML 3.2.

[timvdalen]

Note that Chrome is actually using Blink now, which itself is a fork of webkit