> I honestly expect a new browser started from scratch in a safe language to be done before Firefox is "ported".
That is a gargantuan project considering all the standards you need to support to have a competitive web browser. Especially javascript engine, video codecs and webgl are attack surfaces that is difficult to replace with code written in a safe language.
I think is less work then pressuring existing projects to be rewritten in Rust. I would usggest Rust fans to pcik one of those dependencies like a codec and reimplementit in Rust or gather money to pay someone to do it, I think it would be faster and less hostile.
From what I read Mozilla fired one or more Rust developers related to the JIT or the interpreter and IMO the JIT should have been the first thing rewritten in Rust since that is one of the components that run arbitrary code. I really hope they can finish the port and I can't wait to see how many zero days will it have.
most of the JIT bugs were probably due to generating unsafe code instead of generating from unsafe code. Rewriting a new JIT will probably increase the number of zero days.
That is a gargantuan project considering all the standards you need to support to have a competitive web browser. Especially javascript engine, video codecs and webgl are attack surfaces that is difficult to replace with code written in a safe language.