[smegsicle]

a big part of why browser engines are so unwieldy is the implied compatibility with every website ever, right?

but the "way way more web developers" you mention are not, at least in the context of electron apps, interested in that feature except tangentially..

so while everyone knows a full web-ready browser engine is impractical to design from scratch, maybe a simplified engine that supports a conservative subset of best-practices web-style design is in order?

[jitl]

There are a bunch of “small subset of HTML” UI toolkits already. The first that comes to mind is Sciter: https://sciter.com/ which bundles QuickJS interpreter, built in support for React-like syntax, and a HTML/CSS like markup and rendering environment. You’ll see on the homepage how it’s used in many products you might have heard of.

The issue here is re-use - Sciter is small and very fast, but won’t run an arbitrary existing web app that targets Chrome. Maybe you could argue for a middler-ground, add more HTML features to Sciter until it can run “most” things… but you’ll end up back to having the whole banana.

[wffurr]

That's a really interesting idea, but in practice you might find that the "conservative sunset" ends up being different for every toolkit and developer.

Maybe something a bit opinionated, like a React Native-only runtime, could fit the bill here.

Or in a sense, is this what Flutter is?