About the Gosub engine

Why build another engine?

Take a look at the browsers available today and you will notice that most of them are based on the same engine. Chrome and Edge share the same foundation, and the engines that power nearly all browsing are effectively concentrated in the hands of two companies. That concentration gives a very small group enormous influence over how the web evolves.

At one point in time, we have the option to choose which browser you wanted to use. Today, we see around 80% marketshare for blink/chromium alone, with a 18% share for webkit (Mac).

We believe the web should be open and free for everyone to use. A healthy web needs a diverse ecosystem of engines, so that no single company or organisation can force its own agenda on the standards and technologies we all depend on.

Our answer: a modular engine

Gosub is a web browser engine written from scratch in Rust. Rather than producing one monolithic engine, we are building a modular system in which developers can plug in their own components: their own rendering pipeline, their own JavaScript engine, their own networking stack. We hope this leads to a more diverse landscape of browsers in the future. We don't want to dominate the market, we want to level the playing field.

A community effort

Building a browser engine demands expertise across many domains: web standards, network protocols, rendering, security, and software architecture. No small team can do this alone. Gosub is a community project, and creating a genuinely competitive alternative will take collaboration from contributors of all backgrounds and skill levels.

Curious where things stand? Check the current project status, or head straight to the contribute page to get involved.