@irrlicht @wolf480pl Well there's people working on WebKit which unlike Chromium and Firefox (XUL and mozembed are gone) is reusable.
And Servo seems to be on pretty good tracks.

Also parallel to osdev is quite interesting, the only brand new OS that have left the hobbyist stage since the mid 90's have been stuck into the embedded side of things (see L4, NuttX, …).

Linux distros? Most are just derivatives of existing ones, sometimes just for purely branding or default configurations.