Comment by refulgentis

You're 110% right. Why would any company care about competition from it? Its years away from being real, then it can start trying to build name recognition like Firefox had to. And once all that's done...does it actually do anything different fundamentally that could lead to a qualitatively different experience, like Servo?

There's a certain set of topics that are beyond my ability to explain exactly why they have an aphrodisiac-like appeal to enough commentators that they can't be discussed.

It's dangerous because if you read the threads, all the signal you'd have is "these are important, noteworthy, well-known projects that even get funded!", and anyone making decisions about their own career based on that would be gravely mistaken.

So, you're left with impressions and no facts: you have no idea that its a web browser that you have to compile to use, most people talking about it aren't using it, even as a toy, even one-off.

The multiple engineers hired to help came from a one-off grant from pandemic-era Shopify that thought it was 10x'ing in size, & it was given for absolutely no reason, strategic or otherwise. That would fund, in actuality, roughly 1 engineer for a year, whereas it's lauded as funding that enabled hiring multiple engineers for the long-term.

I waited days to reply to you, because if I voiced anything remotely straightforward on the topic, it'd be downvoted to invisible, which would have just further reinforced the ideas in a reader, it'd look like I was making inaccurate claims.

* quick try: appeals to 'oh it wasn't that hard' we all meet somewhat regularly while programming. Then add the "I could build Dropbox in a weekend" effect. Then throw in "big tech companies suck", and "all web browsers suck", and you want this to succeed. Then throw in "man this guy sure has an awesome personal story, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and recovered!". Without any counter discussion, which is verboten because of the personal story, you're just getting absolutely bombarded with messaging that appeals to your common HN confirmation biases, you can do it, you can break bigco and fix the web/computers/etc.