[bawolff]

Why though?

I mean, i could understand if you were working on some sort of research prototype that might fail, or otherwise something new and unique, but just porting an existing browser engine hardly seems to be instrinsically exciting in and of itself, so what would the motivation be?

[capableweb]

I've worked on these sort of "5%" / "just in case" projects before and mainly accepted them because they were deeply technical, difficult and I was sure I was gonna learn a lot from them, no matter if we got the go ahead to ship them or not. Sometimes I was the only one in the company who wanted to work on it, while other times it was something everyone wanted to jump on, I guess the conclusion is that different people find different things interesting. Some people like porting software to different platforms for example :)

[sodality2]

Well, lots of people find structural problems with a massive code base but have no justification to rewrite/make changes to it. A chance to revisit decisions might be exciting for someone who feels they could perhaps do a better job with it.