[jcranmer]

There are essentially six pieces to a browser: a platform support library, a graphics rendering platform, a networking layer, the HTML/CSS rendering, the JS VM integration, and the browser shell on top of all of it.

Getting a first cut of really basic HTML rendering--essentially saying, here's a string that's X color and Y font, display it--is probably doable in a day if you have robust implementations of everything else. I have to imagine your director thought that doing HTML rendering was "all" you'd have to do. Of course, what makes building browsers especially hard is there is very tight integration between all of these different components, so that you have to maintain all of these pieces.