I think that the browser was a choice brought about through experimentation. Originally there was going to be a ‘launcher’ but then an issue was realized with mobile’s putting the network to sleep (or some such) and they had to create a separate process to run in the background all the time to keep the network alive … and that just left the launcher with not much to do but look pretty (although desktop could have still used it) … so instead of building a general purpose UI, the browser took over that functionality - so a time saver not a time waster (they didn’t build the browser from scratch like their launcher would have been).
So at the end of the day, IMO the browser ‘addition’ is more akin to a UI replacement and possibly less coding and maintenance in the long run. Well, that’s how I remember it all going down anyway.
IMO, this project IS taking a hella long time … because it is ********* hard to do and there isn’t much point worrying about it. They aren’t reclining on the beach in the Caribbean … you can see that every week here with their report and if that isn’t enough dig into the codebase and watch it being updated!
EDIT: also the UI stuff is the easy bit anyway - doesn’t take much time at all compared to everything else.
