The website makes it sound like all of the code being bespoke and “based on standards” is some kind of huge advantage but all I see is a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
This is obviously also without testing but these guys are serious, senior engineers, so their code will be perfect on the first try, right?
Love the passion though, can’t wait to see how this project plays out.
Sure, but an individual website may use only a few of those standards. Ladybird devs will pick a website they like to use - Reddit, Twitter, Twinings tea, etc. and improve adherence to X or Y standards to make that one website look better. In turn, thousands of websites suddenly work perfectly, and many others work better than before.
Ladybird is largely conformant to the majority of HTML standards now. It’s about the edge cases (and where standards aren’t followed by websites) and performance. This isn’t a new project.
Lol, mentioning Twinings tea together with Reddit and Twitter sounds so random
Andreas Kling, the founder and lead dev, has a massive love for Twinings tea and spent a few Dev logs working on improving their website with the end goal being ordering his tea from them :)
That is a nice little tidbit of information :)
You are assuming that they only started now from point 0. They have probably been working on it for a bit before announcing everything.
Exactly. They have been working on Ladybird Browser for few years already, before it was announced as standalone product (It was a part of SerenityOS).
They say they already use it to manage GitHub issues so it’s definitely more than “point 0” right now.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
Yes, that is exactly the plan: “We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version”
a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards
Yeah, as a layperson this is my take. If mozilla is struggling to stay in the game then I just don’t really see how an unfinanced indie team has a shot.
Let’s not forget that Mozilla (the company) is largely mismanaged, so that doesn’t help.
It might seem that way but it’s a fairly arrogant assertion. They’re a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it’s easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I’m still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.
Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.
Mozilla has loads of projects, not just the browser. I doubt more than a 30 work exclusively on the engine nowadays.
Even if that were true, and it seems unlikely, that’s still an order of magnitude more than the ladybug devs.
They’ve been at it for four years and they plan to have an alpha by 2026. Maybe wait how it actually turns out?
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. I’ve had more than a handful of people bitching at me that it’s impossible to make a new, open web browser in this day.
I think it’s less that it’s “impossible” but rather that it’s expensive.
Honestly we’ve in general shoved too much shit into the browser that’s not strictly related to just browsing web sites.
And you “have to” support all the layers and layers and layers of added stuff, or you can’t “compete”.
But, at the same time, the goals of making a good-enough browser that mostly works and isn’t completely enshittified and captured by corpo big tech interests is a very worthy project and 100% support what they’re doing.
JavaScript was a mistake.
And it went downhill from there.
Eh, scriptable content was probably fine.
Techbros going ‘holy shit, we should make EVERYTHING a website!’ was the curse that doomed us.
Pushing for bloated web apps instead of having optimized and perfectly functional websites was what killed it for me.
or you can’t compete
Nah nah fuck that noise. ‘Jack of all trades but ace of none’ or however the saying goes, is a shitty way to go about things. I don’t have the biggest dick but I know my way around around the block, and I know I’m good at it. More specialized > the catch-all bitches.
Let the fucks with their special engine requirements eat shit. Standardize or write a fucking proper program (miss me with that “app” bullshit) or fuck right off. “everyone is special… exactly like you” now fuck off web dev. Your shit doesn’t get a permit.
…
I may have some… disputes with the way the web is done nowadays.
Love the idea! Shopify as the highest tier sponsor? Not so much.
I mean if they’re gonna give money without demanding anything I’m sure no complaints from the devs.
Shopify or an exec there might find some value in avoiding Google owning the web, could maybe bring goodwill for the company, or they could just be looking for a write off.
I’m curious what issue you see with that? It seems like the project is only accepting unrestricted donations, but is there something suspicious about shopify that makes it’s involvement concerning (I don’t know much about them)?
My best guess would be that Shopify either care about the open Web or had some disagreements with Google.
I can’t find anything shady on them, but maybe I’m looking the wrong places.
I want to follow updates from this project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh
RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.
I share the disappointment.
Funny how in the video the guy say that all other browsers are based on Google’s code. But Firefox is also independent right?
He says “powered by or funded by Google”. Firefox depends on Google financially, most of the income of Mozilla comes from Google paying for being the default search engine.
They try to diversify their income (Firefox VPN, email alias service, etc.), but anything they try gets a huge backlash from the community, and still small compared to the the money from google.
Is this their way of asking Google for money?
I think google need firefox exist to avoid anti trust, and Mozilla need google to keep the the six figures payroll for the CEO. So yes.
Google is Mozilla’s biggest source of income, and google developers have actively contributed code to the Firefox engine.
So you decide for yourself what level of independence you assign to it.
is it open source?
I do not understand the urge to start from scratch instead of forking an existing, mature codebase. This is typically a rookie instinct, but they aren’t rookie so there’s perhaps an alternative motive of some sort.
Because there are only like 3 browser engines: Chrome’s Blink, Firefox’s Gecko and Apple‘s WebKit. And while they are all open source, KHTML, the last independent browser engine got discontinued last year and hasn’t been actively developed since 2016.
There’s need in the space for an unaffiliated engine. Google’s share is far too high for a healthy market (roughly 75%), WebKit never got big outside of Safari (although there are a few like Gnome Web, there’s no up to date WebKit based browser on Windows) and Gecko has its own problems (like lack of HEVC support).
So, in my book, this is exciting news. Sure it‘ll take a while to mature and it is up against software giants but it‘s something because Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy to fight against Google‘s monopoly and Apple doesn’t have to.
Could they not add HEVC support? Or is there some technical limitation that meant starting from zero was a good idea?
HEVC is almost entirely down the the licensing. This section of the wikipedia page details it pretty well.
The tl;dr is that the LA group wanted to hike the fees significantly, and that combined with a fear of locking in led to the mozilla group not to support HEVC.
And it’s annoying at times. Some of my security cameras are HEVC only at full resolution, which means I cannot view them in Firefox.
They could, probably. My guess is, that it’s either a limitation of resources, the issue of licensing fees or Google‘s significant financial influence on Mozilla forcing them to make a worse browser than they potentially could. Similar to how Firefox does not support HDR (although, to my knowledge, there’s no licensing involved there).
The biggest problem most people have with Mozilla is said influence by Google, making them not truly independent.
If 50% of firefox users donated 2 dollars per year mozilla could work for people instead of Google or at least people AND google
The problem is, most user don’t want to pay. And every time mozilla tries to monetise differently they get community backlash…
Webkit and blink have the same base
WDYM “independent” ?
Isn’t mozilla / gecko more or less independent?
They get most of their money from google for the “default search engine deal” make of that what you want. For me personally it doesn’t sound fully independent.
Seems a little idealistic.
If ladybird actually achieves any sort of userbase they would take the same deal in an instant.
Based on the community being quite succsessful so far despite being made by volunteers, I don’t think they will.
Oh my sweet summer child.
There is currently no implementation of web standards that is under a more permissive license than LGPL or MPL. I think that is a gap worth filling and if I recall that is what Ladybird is doing.
Why is that a gap worth filling? There is no benefit to users as long as its free of a EULA they don’t have to care either way. For those wanting to produce open source software based on same they already have all the rights they could need. The only party clamoring for permissively licensed software are companies intending to close off the source and sell other people’s work.
I understand why they would want to do that I don’t understand why anyone would feel the need to work for free for something someone else closes off.
There are some cases where it’s just not possible to release the source code, even if you wanted to.
For example, if you’re developing a Nintendo switch game, you aren’t allowed to release any code that uses Nintendo’s sdk, so that means you also can’t use any copyleft libraries.
Maybe MPL-licensed libraries would be ok though. Idk, I’m not a lawyer.
Why would open source code be released with the intention of helping people who wont or can’t give back?
Why not?
I’ve been in situations where I couldn’t release the code to a project, but I was able to use some decent libraries because they were MIT licensed.
So I’m happy to do the same for libraries I write so that others in similar situations could also receive the same benefit I did.
I see it as an act of public goodwill, like paying it forward for the times you can’t directly contribute to another project.Just my personal view on it, anyway.
I’m not claiming it’s a bulletproof solution or that it isn’t open to being ‘abused’.It’s an act of public goodwill to rich corporations who could get the same privilege by paying for a separate license.
It’s an act of goodwill for all developers.
You’re free to believe it’s a simple black/white “us vs them” issue, but I choose to see the world as more nuanced then that.
I use Firefox.
Ok
I hope this pans out, because I’ve long ago lost hope on Firefox being a worthy alternative to Chromium.
Firefox has been perfectly capable for the entire time it has existed. What are you talking about?
It’s hard to understand the purpose of this. The difficulty of the project (i.e. complexity of the web) is the real problem that needs solving. We don’t need another fork of the browser-verse. We need a fork of the web itself.
They have a fork of the web. Its called the dark web. They use it to sell hookers and drugs.
We also have a fork of money, it’s called crypto and it’s used to sell and buy hookers and drugs. Every fork of something end up used to buy hookers and drugs. Truly marvelous!
C++
If they’re starting a browser from scratch, why would they not have chosen Rust? Seems very short sighted to not have learned from Firefox.
They used c++ initially since it was spawned from SerenityOS, which was designed to be a mashup of win2000 and unix.
now that Ladybird is its own project, it’s not constrained to that goal, and they have said they will incorporate modern languages.
builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code
still chooses to do it in C++
Epic fail
Rust or bust
The language choice was because Ladybird started as a component of SerenityOS, which is also written in C++. With this separation, they are free to gradually introduce other language(s) into the codebase, and maybe eventually replace C++ entirely, piece by piece.
In Hackernews thread about this, the head maintainer mentioned that they have been evaluating several languages already, so we’ll see what the future brings.
In the meantime, let’s try to be mature about it, what do you say?
Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but if not: enlighten us?
C++ is a very old, extremely complex language. There are arguably objectively better modern alternatives, such as Rust.
I agree that Rust is the way to go, but calling something “arguably” & “objectively” in the same breath is a bit of a paradox innit?
Rust is great, but anybody developing something should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer. If you want it made with rust, make it yourself.
Of course, but it still makes sense to think carefully about the advantages of disadvantages of the tools you use when starting any project.
I’m not sure 10 years old are allowed on the internet. Isn’t it time for Coco and bed?
I agree that Rust would be an interesting choice for this project but there’s a reason why this particular project is done in C++
Wasn’t this the transphobic one?
Brave?
Don’t believe they’re related
i like how they’re like this isnt the place for personal politics while ignoring the fact that gendered readme files are patently stupid in the first place.
Changing to gender neutral seems like a no brainer to me but how is this transphobia?
Shoutout to the user pointing out that forcing “he” is just as, if not more, political ❤️
Remind me in 2 years when this project becomes discontinued…
As Firefox will introduce Manifest V3 which will make ad-blockers unusable, I hope they will not implement that as well … But since this is so new, this will not have any add-ons at all for the foreseeable future
Stop spreading lies. Firefox will not deprecate the APIs that enable adblocking..
