Some small browsers exist that use webkit/webengine for the heavy lifting. Two notable examples even have vim-like interfaces: qutebrowser and jumanji.
Extending them might be easy, depending on the quality of the existing code base. We also need to evaluate these projects for maintainability: they're obviously going to have much less development power.
If it's comparable to this project done in webextensions, then we might want to just build our own/fork/contribute.
But what do we lose? What do the non-gecko bits of firefox do? What's left in the chrome repo if you remove webengine? I don't really know.
- Kerning/font presentation code? (text in qutebrowser looks bad on Windows, don't know why)
- Cross-platform OS shit
- Firefox sync is neat and would be missed.
- safebrowsing?
- how much security stuff in engine/vs browser?
- webm, webgl and similar? Presumably handled either by the engine or externally, but maybe picking and maintaining link to external thing is expensive.
- flash handling?
- What UI stuff are we not replacing?
- developer tools (neat, but no reason for us to re-implement).
We also lose access to the existing addon/extension repos. Maybe if we implemented webextension support in our own browser we'd get them back? Don't know how difficult that is.
What addons do I use and would I miss them?
Should be part of the browser anyway:
- stylish --> :style, or maybe .vimperator/styles/ (with magic comments?)
- greasemonkey --> builtin/extensions/autocmds
- site blocker --> /etc/hosts
Maybe not:
- element hiding rules (ublock) not supported
- tree tabs --> better :buffer?
- lazarus form recovery is brilliant...
- noscript is shit anyway
- hide fedora is neat, but maybe just an element hiding list? Maybe it does have to parse differently.
- example of neat addon that a smaller browser wouldn't have available, anyway.
- ref control is neat, but the UI is pants. Would be easy to build an ex-mode interface.
- pwgen is trivial
- https everywhere --> builtin?