they could have found a skilled developer to update our existing browser years ago, before we fell so far behind.
Did Ecomstation contribute to the browser? Or something changed that they didn't need to?
Yes, first they paid Rich to fix the printing. That was FF v4. Walter and I took it to v10, then Serenity paid Bitwise for 17 to 45, actually at the end the community was paying. I supported SM and TB, easy once Firefox built and ran as they all use the same engine. At that point I was left alone with a few resources from Arca Noae and I don't have the skills to do what was needed for 52 and it took awhile for me to even get it building to the point where we needed someone much more knowledgeable. I also ported it to the newer GCC and applied a lot of security fixes from 10four (Mac fork of 45).
In theory someone knowledgeable could continue development to the latest PaleMoon with our source, though PaleMoon has really rearranged the source.
Meanwhile Bitwise thought that porting Chromium would be a better route using Qt. Turned out pretty hard, newer GCC was needed, lots of libc updates and got Qt5 to where it is now. Development kind of stopped due to issues updating Qt5 on our system and then war broke out and the developer left Russia and spent quite a bit of time stateless. Paul applied the Qt5 patches to Qt6 but wasn't skilled enough to really go on. One problem is that Qt6 doesn't officially support 32 bits, so no testing by the Qt folks and no worries about freeing memory at times.
At the beginning of the month, Dmitriy, Bitwise's lead developer, did post that he expects to get back to working on Qt6 in the next couple of months.
Meanwhile KOMH has ported our build system to 64bit Linux which should really help. Memory has been a problem compiling browsers since FF10 where I needed VAL=3072 and at the time with only 1.5 GB of actual ram, the swap file could overflow (2.1GB limit) and crash the system if I did anything else while building. Linking some of the Chromium DLL's is even harder due to the memory limits of our system.
It's actually amazing what we've accomplished in the way of compiling browsers. We were the last 32 bit OS that could build Firefox and considering that most of the design of OS/2 was done in the early 90's or earlier...