> You and ahmoacah should try building your own browser. I'm sure we'd all use it. Then you can see what the issues are in making one work correctly.

Browsers today are written by humongous teams of people, because they have to support so many things. I'm not sure if we'd have more trouble or less, being only two people. Better coordination; less man-power.

Taking a wild guess, I'd say the issues are mostly about the new and evolving nature of the functionality they implement. Browsers are always playing catch-up to some new spec. More time is spent on making them work somewhat than making them work well.

Things like browser-specific extensions and supporting broken HTML code are also issues, but they aren't things that directly affect RinkChat too much.

I wonder if part of the problem is also the limitations of the GUI toolkits being used. My experience with GUI development toolkits is that you always need to do something that the GUI doesn't, and so you wind up making hacks and compromises to work around the GUI's deficiencies (and often its bugs, as GUI toolkits suck also). Browsers are complex, but I don't believe they are more complex than other classes of software applications that seem to be more regularly stable. But I do think browsers probably give the GUI toolkits they're built with more of a workout than most other classes of software applications because of all the HTML forms and javascript and applet support that require the support of all manner of GUI functionality. Such as, for example, the ability to have javascript correctly scroll a frame to the end of an incompletely loaded HTML page.