[HN Gopher] Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M f...
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Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub
Founder
Author : mapper32
Score : 445 points
Date : 2024-07-02 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lunduke.locals.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.locals.com)
| no_time wrote:
| Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they
| can "get back to me with a quote".
|
| Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this
| nice.
| moreofthis wrote:
| I had a similar first impression. The previous logo and
| branding were pretty strong imo even if the SerenityOS and
| ladybird website was/is a bit scrappy. Very cute little
| ladybird, and the natural patterns of a ladybug gave a clear
| visual motif to build from.
|
| People talk about 'polish' in design as a signifier of quality
| but my mind always goes to conching, the process by which cacao
| nibs are ground down over days to produce silky chocolate. You
| need to conch the nibs to grind them past the point that the
| chocolate has a gritty texture in order to get the nice smooth
| chocolate we all love, but what the process also does is grind
| down the sharper notes of the flavour. The further you go the
| more the deeper and richer notes are lost. So too a design
| language and brand can be conched to smooth it out for broader
| consumption, but you can go too far and lose the flavour.
| frou_dh wrote:
| The new logo's shape and colours look reminiscent of Helix's
| https://helix-editor.com, but I agree that the actual
| ladybird was nice.
| account42 wrote:
| I do like to add raw cacao nibs to my chocolate cakes and I
| also prefer the old web over much of the offensively
| inoffensive corportate approved web so maybe there is
| something to your analogy.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| The AI-generated laptop images with incoherent logo and keys
| are the cherry on the soullessness.
| cantreadwont wrote:
| I was about to say that it had a reason to look like ass in
| that they never really worked on it at all to begin with, being
| focused on the browser, which wasn't even good enough for
| anything more than dev work, rather than the presentation of
| it.
|
| But I see now that they actually updated the site.
| Sammi wrote:
| I sorry to say this, but the new visual style is completely
| charmless. The most important thing a non-profit oss project
| needs is a charming visual style. A ladybird for instance is an
| extremely charming little bug, and it was such a strong choice.
| This new style is a huge step back compared to it.
| fouc wrote:
| there is no bug called ladybird, you mean ladybug..
| k8sToGo wrote:
| The ladybug is a beetle and not a bug :)
| lucky13 wrote:
| Ladybird is British English, ladybug is American English.
| nalinidash wrote:
| The old website of this project is worth checking:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240630172605/https://ladybird....
| vaylian wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I have to admit, the old design has
| a lot more charm. The new design is fine, but there is just
| something timeless about the old design
|
| > This page is not fancy because we are focusing on building
| the browser. :^)
|
| I approve this message
| bartekpacia wrote:
| My first impression was the same. Another VC-backed SaaS vibes.
| bArray wrote:
| Discussed previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Welcome to Ladybird_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951 - July 2024 (94
| comments)
|
| _The Ladybird Browser Initiative_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954 - July 2024 (13
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird browser update (June 2024) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838973 - June 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Ladybird browser spreads its wings_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746804 - June 2024 (304
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird browser update (March 2024) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889576 - April 2024 (2
| comments)
|
| _Understanding Complexity Like an Engineer - The Case of the
| Ladybird Browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342887 - Feb 2024 (55
| comments)
|
| _The Ladybird browser project_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449 - Feb 2024 (284
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird browser update (July 2023) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939402 - July 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird and developing a
| browser engine_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36620450
| - July 2023 (65 comments)
|
| _Shopify Sponsored Ladybird Browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36502583 - June 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377805 - June 2023 (166
| comments)
|
| _Early stages of Google Docs support in the Ladybird browser_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33511831 - Nov 2022 (84
| comments)
|
| _Github.com on Ladybird, new browser with JavaScript /CSS/SVG
| engines from scratch_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273785 - Oct 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126 - Sept 2022 (473
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird: A truly new Web Browser comes to Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014061 - July 2022 (8
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird Web Browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987506 - July 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Ladybird Web Browser - SerenityOS LibWeb Engine on Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31976579 - July 2022 (2
| comments)
| dbcooper wrote:
| >Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern
| languages are available?
|
| >Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project,
| which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a
| technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas
| was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now
| we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
|
| >However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own
| independent project, all constraints previously imposed by
| SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a
| number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor
| language to the project in the near future. This process is
| already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple
| languages.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| So half a million lines of tech debt?
| vaylian wrote:
| I think that's too pessimistic. The code is there and it can
| be used to push the project forward. If some part of it is
| not good enough, then an alternative implementation can be
| created (potentially in a different language)
| neocritter wrote:
| A classic:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
| should-...
|
| >> _" The idea that new code is better than old is patently
| absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of
| bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's
| nothing wrong with it. It doesn't acquire bugs just by
| sitting around on your hard drive."_
|
| >> _" Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage
| before they were found. The programmer might have spent a
| couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing
| it. If it's like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line
| of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a
| lot of work and time went into those two characters."_
|
| >> _" When you throw away code and start from scratch, you
| are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected
| bug fixes. Years of programming work."_
|
| It's an older piece, but like good old code, it still holds
| up. Newer tools and technology have improved the creating
| of new code, but they've also made improving old code
| easier in equal measure.
| noduerme wrote:
| The only exception is if you have 500k LOC in a language
| whose runtime is going to be deprecated on all platforms
| overnight.
|
| I'm referring to the uh, retrospectively unfortunate
| decision I made in 2007 to start building large scale
| business app frontends in AS3.
|
| I guess I should be thankful for the work, having to
| rewrite everything in TS from scratch a decade later. (At
| least the backends didn't have to be torn down).
| neocritter wrote:
| There's a parallel universe where someone convinced you
| to rewrite it in something else from the start and you
| spent years on the rewrite instead and it never went
| anywhere. Could you have done that emergency rewrite
| without 10 years of becoming an expert in the problem you
| were solving? The alternative universe has you spending
| time becoming an expert in a new language instead and
| maybe not getting anywhere with the rewrite.
| noduerme wrote:
| Totally true. Spending years fine-tuning the business
| logic and UIs made the eventual rewrites a lot cleaner
| and faster, having already iterated many times over the
| years and discovering what worked and what didn't. And
| learning TS after AS3 was easy enough. The real pain
| point was switching from a paradigm in which I owned the
| screen graph down to the pixel-level placement of each
| component, to a trying to wrangle similar behavior from a
| mix of DOM elements, relative/absolute positioning and
| arbitrary stuff drawn into canvases. Particularly for
| things like interactive Gantt charts and some of the
| really complicated visualization components that had been
| a relative pleasure to design and code in Flash. But
| yeah, it was much easier to learn a new language paradigm
| knowing exactly what I needed to implement, rather than
| having to devise the logic at the same time.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I wonder how many businesses suffered the same?
|
| I remember Flash as a complete, straight-to-business
| platform that allowed me to just focus on getting stuff
| done.
|
| It was a sound decision back then.
| noduerme wrote:
| I think it was a very sound decision back in 2007 if you
| wanted to write once and deploy everywhere. In browser,
| and on the desktop for Windows and Mac. JS wasn't up to
| the task of complex SPAs or graphic visualizations yet
| (<canvas> didn't even exist), and the alternative would
| have been Java apps which relied on whatever runtime the
| user had installed. The fact that Flash/AIR could deploy
| with its own runtime or a browser plugin was huge. It
| allowed an independent coder like me to maintain multiple
| large pieces of software across multiple platforms at a
| time when it was almost unheard of to do that without a
| team.
| voidwtf wrote:
| My current employer, similarly, invested a significant
| amount of resources into Silverlight. Luckily only one
| component of the application had been switched to
| Silverlight, but a significant amount of code was written
| to be the core of that effort and future components
| before browsers/MS killed it overnight.
| silotis wrote:
| It's a good point in general, but in this case it's not
| clear if the cost of re-writing the existing codebase is
| less than the cost of staying with a memory-unsafe
| language.
|
| We know from past experience that it takes an extreme
| amount of time and effort to harden a browser written in
| C++ against malicious web content. The Ladybird codebase
| is not particularly "old" in any sense of the word.
| Judging by Github's stats most of the code is less than 4
| years old and it is still a long ways from being ready
| for general use. I think it's safe to say Ladybird still
| has a vast amount of work to be done fixing
| vulnerabilities that arise from lack of memory safety.
|
| I find it quite plausible that the cost of re-writing the
| existing code in Rust is less than the cost of fixing all
| of the current and future bugs in the C++ codebase that
| Rust would catch at compile time.
| neocritter wrote:
| That is the sneaky thing about rewrites. The "Ship of
| Theseus" rewrite is reasonably safe based on the article
| and what I could find of people sharing their experiences
| with rewrites. Fix what needs fixing, but swap in the
| newer better language/framework/whatever a piece at a
| time. It works!
|
| People get in trouble when they decide to rewrite the
| whole thing. You might be right in this case, but I'm
| sure every person who began a doomed rewrite project felt
| the the benefits outweighed the risks.
|
| Viewed in the rear view mirror of history, the Netscape
| rewrite _was_ a good thing in a technical sense. As far
| as I understand it gave us the foundation for Firefox and
| the Gecko engine. It was just bad business in context
| because it let other browsers run laps around it while
| the rewrite proceeded. It let IE get a foothold that didn
| 't shake for many years until Netscape became Firefox.
|
| Rewriting the new browser in Rust would probably be
| similar from a technical POV. But from a business
| standpoint, we seem to be at an inflection point where a
| new browser might be able to enter in the cracks of
| discontent over sketchy AI features in Edge and the slow-
| boiling attempts to break ad blocking in Chrome. If they
| divert resources now to a rewrite, they could miss this
| opportunity to do to Chrome what Firefox did to IE.
|
| It sounds like the plan is a Ship of Theseus rewrite
| anyway, so they'll get there in time without the risk of
| distraction.
| 8474_s wrote:
| Old code does acquire new bugs by sitting in your hard
| drive, since it interfaces with dozens of libraries and
| APIs that don't care about how well test the code is:
| every path of code is dependent on multiple components
| playing well and following standards/APIs/formats that
| old code has no knowledge of. Also, the mountain of
| patch-fixes and "workarounds" in the end force the
| programmers into a corner, where development is hobbled
| by constraints and quirks of "battle-tested" code, that
| will be thrown away as soon as it couldn't support fancy
| new feature X or cannot use fancy new library API without
| extra layers of indirection.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Would another language have avoided this?
| wiseowise wrote:
| If we go by parents definition of "C++==tech debt", then
| yes.
| chx wrote:
| Nothing but Rust is safe from being attacked by the Rust
| zealots. It's been _extremely_ annoying these last few
| years.
| skywal_l wrote:
| Jakt[0] was being developped by Andreas at some point. It seems
| stall for now.
|
| [0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt
| alkonaut wrote:
| Nice to see. The only thing that would meaningfully set it
| apart from the others would be to have a core that isn't a big
| ball of C++. That would potentially allow it to be developed
| and maintained with less resource than the other browsers, and
| that would be the only way this ever reaches any kind of
| impact.
| fregonics wrote:
| If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was
| even created inside Mozilla.
| kobalsky wrote:
| Only around 11% of it is Rust according to
| https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ , which by the
| way is no small feat given how huge the code base is.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It is. They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e.
| one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by
| doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost
| impossible in C++. To the point where creating a whole new
| language just to solve the problem would be a smaller
| undertaking. Which says something about the scope of this
| problem. And I really do think they are right.
| tombert wrote:
| Why is it almost impossible? I'm a little out of practice
| with C++ but I thought the modern C++ features were
| considered pretty solid in regards to memory safety and
| the like?
| nicebyte wrote:
| c++ isn't memory safe and will probably never be. that
| being said, it's not more or less possible to create an
| efficient browser engine for multicore systems with c++
| than any other language. programming language is not the
| thing that makes the task difficult.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| C++ has indeed added many features that help with memory
| safety, at the cost of getting increasingly more
| complicated and harder to work with.
| mirsadm wrote:
| Eh that is a huge stretch. Besides Firefox is still
| significantly less performant than Chromium.
| drsnow wrote:
| In what ways? I'm curious as I have been under the
| impression it's no longer much of a difference in the way
| it used to be.
| ploxiln wrote:
| > writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example
| uses multiple cores efficiently by doing
| layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in
| C++
|
| C++ also happens to be the only language in which that
| has been accomplished, so far. (The Rust components are
| relatively smaller, about 11% according to sibling
| comments.)
|
| See also: AAA video games
| Sammi wrote:
| Also the web standards themselves are written in an object
| oriented style. Using a non oo language like rust is therefore
| an uphill battle where you end up fighing against the language.
| The web standards just lend themselves naturally to be
| implemented in an oo language like c++.
| pjc50 wrote:
| ?! Rust is roughly equally as OO as C++ is. Which is not
| surprising given its aim to replace C++.
|
| https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-00-oop.html
| Sammi wrote:
| Rust does not make it simple or easy to reference objects
| from objects. You will be fighting the borrow checker if
| you try. This is what I mean.
|
| The web standards have lots of references between
| everything. This type of object oriented programming means
| having lots and lots of cycles in your object graph. This
| makes Rust very veeeery unhappy. The Servo people are
| trying, and they have been trying for a looong time...
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I don't understand, isn't this what Arc is for? An
| "automatically garbage" collected pointer? Or is it not
| well behaved for this use case (i.e. blowing the stack on
| free)
| Avamander wrote:
| True, but the patterns allowed on the web (or in GUIs for
| that matter) are incredibly painful in Rust.
|
| There was a nice article about the GUI part:
| https://www.warp.dev/blog/why-is-building-a-ui-in-rust-so-
| ha...
|
| These points are even more painful with web standards.
| kamov wrote:
| I think that pioneering the work of reimplementing web
| standards in not strictly OOP language will make the
| implementation easier for anyone else in the future, surely
| many of the problems exist by virtue of being done for the
| first time
| awesomekling wrote:
| Hello friends, Ladybird founder here!
|
| Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-
| profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k
|
| Happy to answer questions :)
| skywal_l wrote:
| What is the biggest challenge you expect for ladybird to be
| successful and do you consider this project still a "hobby"
| now?
|
| Thanks again for your hard work!
| awesomekling wrote:
| We have a number of big challenges in the immediate future,
| but I think the biggest one of all will be the long tail of
| compatibility and correctness issues that inevitably awaits
| us after everything falls into place.
|
| This is definitely more than a hobby at this point. I already
| manage 3 employees, with 3 more joining in the next month!
| ykonstant wrote:
| I hope that you continue your herculean efforts to
| investigate the specs and insist on correctness; the
| resulting implementations, dug up inconsistencies and edge
| cases will undoubtedly be of independent interest and
| invaluable to the community.
| ledgerdev wrote:
| > We have a number of big challenges in the immediate
| future, but I think the biggest one of all will be the long
| tail of compatibility and correctness issues
|
| No kidding... how about get it roughly working on hacker
| news, and make it the hackers way to start each day, and
| pull in as much help and community as possible from here?
| yuvadam wrote:
| How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long
| term sustainable project?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ask for money from the start?
| account42 wrote:
| And don't ignore or intentionally alienate the users who
| might be inclined to donate.
| awesomekling wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "Mozilla's fate". In general,
| we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope
| that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things
| simple and more sustainable financially. :)
| yuvadam wrote:
| Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is
| that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm
| not intimate with their finances, but it seems just
| building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D
| effort.
|
| Are you planning on charging your users?
| tinco wrote:
| I think it's the other way around. They determined that
| to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should
| explore other directions, and that hasn't been very
| succesful.
|
| Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for
| new browser technology was part of their strategy going
| forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me
| excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements
| about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently
| bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their
| opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here,
| it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for
| the technical novelty. I know I do.
| awesomekling wrote:
| We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize
| them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted
| donations only.
| coldpie wrote:
| I wish you luck, more competition in the browser space is
| sorely needed. But please, please spend more time
| thinking about your finances. The surface of planet
| "Startups That Will Figure Out A Business Model Later" is
| like 99.9% graveyard. You're going to be asking people to
| depend on your software for an extremely important part
| of their lives. If you don't have a path to
| sustainability, you're going to do a lot of harm when you
| close up shop.
|
| Between the lack of a business plan and your responses
| about licensing, I'm afraid I feel you're coming at this
| from a naive point of view. This is a seriously important
| line of software you're entering, please do take some
| time to take it seriously.
|
| Will watch your progress and again, I genuinely love to
| see your project. Good luck.
| account42 wrote:
| A non-profit foundation taking donations _is_ a
| "business" plan and IMO the only one that has a chance of
| building a true _user_ agent in the long run. That doesn
| 't mean that it is guaranteed to succeed but I don't
| think there is a better funding option thatwon't come
| with conflicting incentives.
| coldpie wrote:
| No, "people give us money" is not a business plan. When
| you're starting a business (yes, non-profits are
| businesses) and employing people, you need to be thinking
| about marketing, user acquisition & conversion, pricing
| structures, corporate sponsorships, and so on. I know
| it's not as much fun as programming, but neither is
| eating out of your neighbor's trash because you can't pay
| your bills.
| lukan wrote:
| It is a non profit foundation. Not a buisness. And so far
| they managed quite well to get funds without all the
| buisness plan things you want them to add.
|
| Mozilla went that route and many are not happy with that.
|
| So I am really happy for Kling and the project, that they
| managed what many others only dreamed about. Focusing on
| developement - delivering - building trust - getting
| funds.
|
| Why do you want to change the plan, when it is working?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| You personally I believe without reservation about this,
| but the thing about creating a legal person is that it's
| separate from you. Its control can--and in the long run,
| will--change hands. So please, please write this down
| somewhere, ideally somewhere binding on its future (can
| donations have conditions?).
| awesomekling wrote:
| We've committed to this in our application for tax-exempt
| status, so it's something the organization will be stuck
| with. :)
| logicprog wrote:
| Despite that, I hope you'll consider a "pay what you can"
| popup when downloading the browser, or a donation button
| built into the browser settings page along with a one-
| time reminder, or something like that. I don't think that
| would be monetizing your users in any negative,
| extractive sense like ads do, it would still
| _essentially_ just be a donation, just asked for in a
| more obvious way and made easy and convenient to do _as
| part of using the app_ , instead of a vague separate
| thing that'll take work to find and that won't occur to
| most people to do. Personally I think charging users for
| software (as long as it is also FOSS) is totally fine,
| it's probably the only sustainable model for software
| that isn't ads or corporate sponsorship, and it actually
| serves to align the incentives of the software's
| developers more closely with users, instead of doing
| anything bad, but I respect that line.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Unless you are planning to live off the _interest_ from
| your donations, how will this be possible?
| awesomekling wrote:
| With a simple two-part strategy:
|
| 1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at
| least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.
|
| 2. We continue fundraising actively.
| mdasen wrote:
| I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the
| Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year
| via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that
| Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.
|
| I don't know if people will donate for their browser like
| they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy
| to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla
| takes in $10M/year in contributions.
| okasaki wrote:
| I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software
| project.
|
| If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money
| acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead
| attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously
| running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and
| just focused on the browser and improving the development
| experience (is there a worse open source project than
| Moz??), they might fare better.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Don't throw money away into non-browser related projects
| while constantly pissing off your loyal userbase.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Look, I am as annoyed as you are with the constant barrage
| of "rewritten in Rust" projects, but if Mozilla did not try
| various other projects that are not browser, there would be
| no Rust.
| adwn wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Rust was born with building a
| browser engine in mind, or at least it was one of its
| earliest motivations. So Rust would have been a thing
| even if Mozilla had focused on their core product.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >So Rust would have been a thing even if Mozilla had
| focused on their core product.
|
| Plus, while Firefox is their main product, it's been
| decades since Mozilla has been solely a browser company.
| It's like saying Microsoft should stop making Office
| because it detracts from their OS business. Companies can
| make more than one product. Some of those products are
| going to have shorter lifespans or smaller userbases than
| others and that's OK.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Rust wasn't a Mozilla project per se, it was something a
| person who happened to be working for Mozilla was messing
| around with and it got internal traction.
|
| But I'm actually ok with a lot of the non-firefox
| projects that they have like the VPN.
|
| What I do have an issue with is the foundation, throwing
| money away at various projects that have very little to
| do with making firefox better. From "trusworthy AI"
| research grants to giving 387k to the Mckensie Mack group
| or 375k to the New Venture Fund (I get Mozilla are
| lefties but what does this have to do with Firefox?) plus
| some other organizations that I can't even tell if they
| aren't just money laundering fronts as they don't appear
| to actually do anything.
|
| That and the C-Suite being complete parasites. The CEO of
| Mozilla corp makes almost as much in a year as the
| Mozilla foundation makes from donations.
|
| Remove the parasites and the senseless spending of the
| foundation and you could develop Firefox with the ~20% of
| revenue that doesn't come from Google.
| trustno2 wrote:
| Huh I didn't know that Mozilla Ventures exist.
|
| Well, okay
| m0llusk wrote:
| Also the Mozilla originated Fluent project for
| localization is another example of a stand out approach.
| It would be interesting to see how localization fits with
| the Ladybird browser project as a whole. Making use of a
| custom implementation of Fluent might actually be a good
| way of moving forward.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some
| professional translators, the reaction was along the
| lines of: "Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my
| existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no."
| More generally, a technical translator's flow is turning
| a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal
| distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I'm
| not sure Fluent--however nice it looks--facilitates that.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling
| is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption
| is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of
| most features.
| metalloid wrote:
| Instead of rebuild 'everything' in Rust, we just can use
| AI to optimize C/C++.
|
| We don't need another programming language.
| account42 wrote:
| Wow you actually managed to make me hate the inane "why
| not rewrite it in rust" commenters a tiny bit less.
| lukan wrote:
| I thought it was funny.
|
| (I hope it was a joke)
| Sammi wrote:
| I've heard Andreas Kling say that they will not accept
| donations that have strings attached. This means they can
| never sell search engine placement to Google for instance.
| This is what ties Mozilla to Google.
| awesomekling wrote:
| That's right. The Ladybird Browser Initiative will only
| accept unrestricted donations. We're missing out on a fair
| bit of money this way, but we believe it's the right path
| for us.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work
| you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving
| performance for a specific usecase etc?
| tomaytotomato wrote:
| Its easy to avoid the fate of Mozilla, don't get involved and
| distracted by lots of side projects.
|
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Past-projects
| account42 wrote:
| It does seem the apple doesn't fall far from the money
| tree.
| fguerraz wrote:
| Mozilla's fate? You mean building a browser that works?
|
| Indeed, I doubt very much that Ladybird will get there.
| Tepix wrote:
| I use Firefox every day, but they have lost so much market
| share that they have become pretty insignificant. They seem
| to have an oversized and poor management with fat
| paychecks.
| soundnote wrote:
| Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg.
| Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for
| activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new
| interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual
| browser development.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| The new interim CEO has been there for such a short time
| that she can't possibly have breathed life in anything
| (she managed to get sued by the former CPO for health
| based discrimination though, so there's that).
| courseofaction wrote:
| What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many
| things, but purely browser focused is not it.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| I would say the browser it's not even in their mind at this
| point. High level people inside Mozilla not only implied
| but said it directly.
| ajrowls wrote:
| Source for this claim?
| nalinidash wrote:
| Though,very recently,they are giving more attention to
| Firefox, or at least want us to see this way.
|
| For example: the reddit AMA on firefox unofficial
| subreddit[1],the mozilla connect post on things they are
| working on[2]etc.
|
| [1]:https://new.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/wer
| e_the_f...
| [2]:https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-
| what-we-re...
| beretguy wrote:
| Maybe they'll add tab groups.
| nalinidash wrote:
| They are currently working on it.
| Sammi wrote:
| Finally get out from under Google's thumb. As soon as
| Ladybird is half as good as Firefox, then this is reason
| enough for me to switch. I've lost faith in Mozilla's
| leadership, and I believe the root cause is the Google money
| that they rely on.
| ironmagma wrote:
| If Ladybird is "forked" from SerenityOS now, does that mean the
| mainline won't run on Serenity any longer?
| awesomekling wrote:
| That's right. A version of Ladybird remains in the SerenityOS
| repo, and people are cherry-picking changes as we go.
|
| Over time, I expect them to diverge enough that this becomes
| impractical, as Ladybird now allows 3rd party code while
| SerenityOS does not. It's up to the SerenityOS community how
| to handle this.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| What's the biggest technical challenge you envision in the
| future? It's the amount of "standards" you need to implement
| and maintain? What's the JavaScript engine situation?
| awesomekling wrote:
| There are a ton of standards at a glance, but when you look
| closer, you realize that much of it isn't implemented by
| other browsers either, and you only need a fraction of it to
| render 90%+ of the web. The last 10% will be a huge
| challenge, but we've got a long way to go before then.
|
| The JavaScript engine is our own LibJS, currently sitting at
| 94.3% pass rate on https://test262.fyi/ (although the number
| might be a little outdated, it's supposed to be higher! Need
| to investigate this..)
| Y_Y wrote:
| What's the trouble with the Android port?
| awesomekling wrote:
| It's an unmaintained prototype without anyone actively
| working on it.
|
| Once we get the desktop version into decent shape, we will
| direct more attention to mobile platforms. At the moment
| there's just too much important low-hanging fruit that's
| easier to develop (and debug!) on desktop :)
| F3nd0 wrote:
| Congratulations on the kick-off! Now that Ladybird is no longer
| a part of SerenityOS, will you consider a switch to a licence
| which not only grants, but also protects user freedoms (e.g.
| the GPL, MPL, EUPL)?
|
| Also, any thoughts on having official communication channels on
| some open, freedom-respecting platforms, rather than Discord
| only?
| pferde wrote:
| Indeed. This is something I could see myself contributing to
| (or attempting to, anyway), but as soon as I saw
| Discord+Github, I lost all interest.
|
| Github I can understand to some extent, it's a convenient
| temporary staying place until they can afford, community-
| wise, to move to something truly open, but Discord? In this
| day and age?
| dandellion wrote:
| Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people
| stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so
| it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will
| start using other things after that, but by then we'll have
| a decade of lost content.
| komadori wrote:
| Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a
| member of so many interesting communities across a range
| of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely
| on the company to keep it going as it is.
| paulcole wrote:
| > but Discord? In this day and age?
|
| What's your recommended alternative?
| guappa wrote:
| discuss?
| freedomben wrote:
| Matrix is a wonderful alternative
| account42 wrote:
| Better but a the real alternative is what we had before:
| publicly visible forums, mailing lists with an archive,
| etc. I'm not going to sign up for your discussion group
| without being able to get a feel for the community first.
| pferde wrote:
| Indeed. There can never be just one platform for project
| communication, because there are different kinds of
| communication - mostly sorted between synchronous and
| asynchronous.
|
| So, IRC, Matrix (these can even be interconnected) for
| synchronous, mailing lists or forums for asynchronous.
|
| And of course issue tracker, where some topical
| communication can happen as well, but that could
| completely be covered by mailing lists.
|
| There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your
| FOSS project's infrastructure.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| IRC. And for slow discussions with long messages, you can
| use NNTP.
|
| (However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only
| want to download the repository, regardless of what else
| they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other
| services as well can be helpful)
| thiht wrote:
| > but Discord? In this day and age?
|
| Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell
| are you talking about? You might not like Discord for
| whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or
| legacy is very weird sounding.
| pferde wrote:
| It is the platform of this day and age much like
| Instagram or Xitter is. Doesn't make it very smart for
| FOSS projects to be using it for their primary
| coordination and communication.
| awesomekling wrote:
| Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a
| less permissive license.
|
| And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like
| GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and
| more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of
| alternatives, and found that they all introduced more
| friction than we were comfortable with.
|
| Although the task of building a browser is itself
| challenging, we're a pragmatic project :)
| dataflow wrote:
| > There are currently no plans to switch to a less
| permissive license.
|
| Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually
| do become wildly successful, this means that others
| (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser
| and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you
| behind and _taking away your users_! Would highly recommend
| leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you
| 're really okay with the project defeating itself through
| its own success.
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| KHTML was the basis for Chrome and Safari. A valid
| concern
| eitland wrote:
| Chrome in itself is not the problem. Competition is good.
| Firefox is better now thanks to Chrome.
|
| Neither is Safari. Safari is actually part of the
| solution. Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by
| being the only option on iOS for a long time and a better
| choice for many (because of battery usage) on Mac OS.
| Without Safari I am afraid we would all be locked into
| Chrome now.
|
| The problem is that Google, like Microsoft before them,
|
| 1. used their dominant position in one market to force
| their way into dominating another market,
|
| 2. used various underhanded tactics to make users think
| Chrome were better while in reality it was just given
| better treatment by their backend servers and also the
| Googles frontend devs[1]
|
| 3. and that unlike Microsoft they still haven't got a
| multi billion fine for it and haven't been forced to
| advertise alternative browsers for months.
|
| [1]: see various bugs[2] in everything from the core of
| the Angular framework to Google Calendar to YouTube
|
| [2]: yes, I am generous enough to consider them bugs. I
| am fairly certain though that bugs that doesn't affect
| Chrome aren't exactly considered top priority.
| soundnote wrote:
| EU law does force them to advertise alternative search
| engines. I just updated Chrome on my work laptop and they
| gave me a slate of search engines. My Chrome defaults to
| Brave Search now.
| jampekka wrote:
| > Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being
| the only option on iOS for a long time
|
| Amazing.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
| eitland wrote:
| Hehe.
|
| But more seriously: it is actually the truth.
|
| Kind of in in the same way that people are thankful for
| Churchill: not because he was a fantastic man in every
| way (he wasn't) but because he saved us from something
| even worse.
| jampekka wrote:
| Big Brother keeps Oceania safe from Eurasia and Eastasia.
| And especially from Emmanuel Goldstein.
| talldayo wrote:
| > But more seriously: it is actually the truth.
|
| If you have to convince people that you are seriously
| telling the truth, you are probably making an unproven
| assertion that relies on many benefits of the doubt.
| josephd79 wrote:
| I thought the other browsers on IOS were just skins of
| webkit / safari ?
| freehorse wrote:
| Yes, and the commenter claims that in this context this
| is actually good because it halted chrome/chromium's
| dominance in the internet (and I actually agree). It may
| sound paradoxical, but context is important imo.
| eitland wrote:
| That is to a large degree correct.
|
| I even thought it wasn't necessary to test them
| separately but I recently heard from someone with more
| and more recent experience that some differences exist,
| particularly around prefixed css attributes. Can't say
| for sure though, but that was why I wrote my comment
| above somewhat defensively.
| TheDong wrote:
| > Safari is actually part of the solution ...
|
| > Google, like microsoft, <1-3>
|
| If you're going to complain about 1-3 for google and ms,
| I don't think you can praise safari in the same breath.
|
| Apple's abused their position with the iPhone to make
| safari relevant, and unlike Chrome and IE, users can't
| just install another browser.
|
| Apple's behavior is the only reason I can't run my own
| addons I've written for firefox on iOS (they run _fine_
| on android of course), why I can't run uBlock origin on
| iOS, and so on.
|
| Apple's behavior on iOS is far more egregious than
| anything microsoft or google has ever done.
|
| I never once had to run IE or Chrome unwillingly since I
| could always install netscape, or mosaic, or firefox.
|
| I'm forced to run Safari, unable to decently block ads,
| unable to use the adons I've written, unable to fork and
| patch my browser to fix bugs, and I've generally had my
| software freedoms infringed... and if I don't run safari,
| then I can't talk to my family group chat (no androids
| allowed, sms breaks the imessage group features too much)
| or talk to my grandma who only knows how to use facetime.
|
| I wish so much I could use a phone with firefox, but I
| can't justify having a spare iPhone just to talk to my
| family, so I'm kinda forced to suffer through safari,
| held hostage by apple's monopolistic iMessage behavior.
|
| The only thing that comes close to Apple's behavior is
| Google's campaign to force Chromebooks upon children in
| classrooms, requiring them to use Chrome, but at least
| Google isn't holding their grandmother's hostage... and
| managed work/school devices already are kinda expected to
| have substantially less freedom than personal devices, so
| it feels much less egregious.
| rimunroe wrote:
| Maybe I missed something but your arguments seem be about
| how Apple's locking down of iOS/iPadOS and Safari are
| harmful to user freedom. That's a _very_ different
| argument from the one the person you're replying to was
| making. They were saying that the popularity of Apple's
| mobile devices coupled with their only running Safari
| holds back a Chrome monopoly in the browser space. If
| people don't support Safari they lose out on a large
| portion of users.
| talldayo wrote:
| > If people don't support Safari they lose out on a large
| portion of users.
|
| If people don't support Safari, it's because the free
| market has spoken and overwhelmingly chooses alternative
| options: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/desktop/worl...
|
| The story would be different, if Apple wasn't miserly
| with their native APIs and App distribution. But this is
| indeed a harmful and competition-restricting decision,
| even in Mozilla's opinion:
| https://mozilla.github.io/platform-tilt/
|
| So I think we can safely assume that Apple's policy harms
| browser diversity by forcing their users to support a
| single minority option. If their users preferred a more
| feature-filled browser, we would never know; they aren't
| sincerely presented an alternative choice. If Apple wants
| their users to defend Safari, maybe they should invest in
| it until their browser (or Operating System, for that
| matter) competes with Chrome. Until then, they're
| promoting a megalomaniac solution and being a sore loser
| about it at the same time.
| mastercheif wrote:
| Orion Browser includes experimental Firefox extension
| support on iOS https://kagi.com/orion/
| BirAdam wrote:
| WebKit is still an open project as is Blink. Why would
| this be concerning?
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| My comment was a response. It's a concern for Ladybird
| not Webkit. It's about the licence. But OP is ok with
| that so.
| awesomekling wrote:
| Yes, we are aware of how permissive licenses work.
|
| If someone forks our code and does a better job with it
| than we do, fair game. :)
| dataflow wrote:
| Note they won't have to do a better job in the long run,
| just a good enough job in the short run to leave you
| behind. But yeah, as long as you're keeping this in mind
| :) best of luck!
| freehorse wrote:
| Not even that sometimes, browser popularity can just be a
| matter of advertising (eg how chrome took off in the
| internet explorer offboarding era even though there were
| objectively equal or better alternatives at the time by
| just using google's internet omnipresence at the time for
| advertising). Sadly, modern internet is governed more by
| advertising industry rather than any kind of open-
| internet principles.
|
| But ultimately this is all developers' decisions and I
| respect that. If anything, if a major company decided to
| take off and invest, they could do it in any case,
| publishing their modified source code would not make that
| much of difference essentially. It is really refreshing
| to see at last a browser that does not absolutely depend
| on google's resources in any way.
| guappa wrote:
| Just so you know, chromium exists now as an open source
| project because KDE developers used GPL.
| dataflow wrote:
| Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL
| prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about
| Google Chrome?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered
| Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed
| rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their
| Konqueror browser.
| dataflow wrote:
| That part I know, but how are you saying that prevented
| Chromium from being closed-source, and why didn't the
| same apply to Google Chrome?
| riwsky wrote:
| It didn't: that's the joke.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Its a good thing the GPL stopped google from taking it
| and running with it!
| cabalamat wrote:
| But if they embrace, extend and extinguish, in a way that
| harms your users' freedom, that would not IMO be a good
| outcome.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Those users can always use the original browser. They
| haven't lost anything.
| cabalamat wrote:
| Imagine Ladybird is developed and is successful. Lots of
| people use it to read websites.
|
| But then Badcorp takes the code and builds their own
| varient with extensions. Badcorp is big and has lots of
| market share. Lots of people use Badcorps's browser, and
| because lots of people are using it, lots of web
| developers code for it, including coding for its
| extensions.
|
| Soon, lots of websites -- including Badcorp's own
| websites, and they have lots of popular ones -- use the
| extensions in the Badcorp browser.
|
| Then people still using Ladybird can't use it for most
| websites. They _have_ lost something.
| zarzavat wrote:
| What if BadApple takes BSD and forks it. Then they make
| their own BSD with extensions that only works on their
| own shiny fruit hardware.
|
| What have the original BSD users lost? Absolutely
| nothing. BSD still exists, it's still maintained, and
| people can still use it. They can also use fruit BSD if
| they want.
| riwsky wrote:
| Darwinism, one might say.
| freehorse wrote:
| BSD and BadApple have a very small intersection of
| targeted markets.
| eitland wrote:
| Reality check:
|
| 1. All the BSDs have been out there for decades without
| anyone running with it.
|
| 2. Google and Microsoft - while being a shadow of their
| former selves technically - are probably still very
| capable of reimplementing whatever they want.
|
| 3. If Ladybird gets so wildly popular, lets celebrate
| wildly!
| Y_Y wrote:
| You wouldn't count OSX as someone running with BSD?
| eitland wrote:
| I run Mac OS.
|
| I am aware that it builds on BSD.
|
| Yet BSD is very alive and nobody who wants BSD is lost to
| Mac.
|
| At least I personally have never heard anyone
| deliberating over a free BSD vs Mac.
|
| Edit: and of course upvote. Apple ran with it. But they
| didn't run away with it. We still have it. Actually we
| have some patches thanks to them. As I mentioned in my
| other reply: Open source is not a zero sum game.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Actually we have some patches thanks to them.
|
| In a relative sense, I would argue that Apple has
| pilfered an order of magnitude higher value from the
| community than they have given back. The only example of
| Apple's net-positive contributions seem to be CUPS and
| LLVM, both of which were cross-platform before Apple took
| control. Compared with how much networking and userland
| code they've taken it feels like a trillion-dollar
| pittance. Even Microsoft chips in more.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, macOS is sort of BSD, but not quite. The kernel
| isn't really BSD despite large sections being originally
| taken from BSD. The XNU kernel isn't really BSD anymore.
| Then, the userland (BSD is both kernel and userland
| developed together) isn't really BSD anymore, and Apple
| neglects their UNIX userland anyhow.
| criddell wrote:
| Don't forget the PS5! At it's heart it's just a computer
| running FreeBSD.
| rsprinkle wrote:
| Cisco's OS is a fork of BSD.
| eitland wrote:
| I don't know. But if so, what?
|
| Have you caught anyone deciding to go with Cisco instead
| of BSDs on their servers or their laptop?
|
| I'm serious here: Open source isn't a zero sum game.
|
| Partially thanks to the permissive license of BSD we now
| have both Mac OS and JunOS (edited: it said Cisco first),
| which is a good thing, not a bad thing.
|
| The problem with Chrome isn't that it exist but that it
| has been forced upon us and the fact that we know they
| have used questionable methods to establish it as the
| dominant browser.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Which one? They have dozens of "OSes" across their
| various products.
|
| Cisco IOS is absolutely not based on BSD - it is a
| proprietary kernel, and such that it even has a
| "userland", a proprietary userland.
|
| IOS XE is based on Linux.
|
| Most of the voice stuff is Linux.
|
| Perhaps you are thinking of Juniper's JunOS, which is
| based on FreeBSD?
| yarq wrote:
| ASyncOS is a fork of FreeBSD.
|
| It is used in Cisco's email and web security appliance,
| which is also their hosted offering. This appliance was
| previously known as IronPort, before being acquired by
| Cisco.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I'm sure that's definitely what the parent commenter was
| thinking of.
| teekert wrote:
| "Better" is a subjective term. I would probably stay on
| OG Ladybird if it meant MS/Google-ified LB starts
| screenshotting/OCRing/Uploading/LLMing all the data, even
| if it were to become faster and more slick.
|
| Slow computing it's sometimes called [0]
|
| I sometimes experience some friction (really acceptable
| though) on Firefox, it has never lured me to Edge of
| Chrome. Some people have standards you know ;)
|
| [0] https://www.slowcomputingbook.com/
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| They're backed by Shopify. If Google or Microsoft forked
| it that would probably be the best thing they could hope
| for.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Hey, just a reality check:_
|
| It's rather condescending of you to assume that the
| developers of Ladybird aren't fully aware of the
| consequences that their choice of license entails.
| dataflow wrote:
| That certainly wasn't the intention. Was there really a
| need to turn this into a personal swipe? This is a common
| outcome _many_ smart and talented developers have
| historically come to regret. You can find their stories
| all over the web, including right here on HN. I didn 't
| want to see the same thing happen here, is all.
| enriquto wrote:
| > (...) switch to a less permissive license.
|
| License "permissiveness" is a relative concept. From the
| point of view of the users of your software, the GPL is
| more permissive than MIT, since they have permission to see
| the source code. If you release software under MIT or BSD
| licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users
| of your software.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Don't spread FUD please. Middlemen can't change
| Ladybird's license or prevent anyone from seeing its
| source code.
|
| I know that's not what you meant, but it is what you
| said.
| freedomben wrote:
| If you look at the parent comment directly above in the
| hierarchy, it is pretty clear that they are talking about
| a company coming in and taking it, adding stuff to it,
| and calling it their own browser. I think you have to try
| pretty hard to read in that GP is saying that the
| original source code license would be changed.
| flykespice wrote:
| That is a complete nonsensical claim & willful attempt at
| spreading misinformation:
|
| Permissive licenses doesn't grants you less freedom than
| GPL, infact it grants you more because the user also has
| the freedom to modify source code without being enforced
| to make it public.
|
| Companies copying the codebase to their propietary ones
| won't automatically strip right of users, licenses don't
| work like that, the original codebase will still be fine.
| Whether said companies will contribute back is
| irrelevant.
| guappa wrote:
| So pre-civil war USA was more free, because people had
| the freedom to own slaves?
|
| We have to simply ignore the bit about slaves having no
| freedom...
|
| (If you read this comment and think I am pro-slavery, you
| are not apt at human communication and should take steps
| to improve)
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm guessing you're being downvoted for comparing
| software to slavery. Generally speaking, the modern
| society seems to have forgotten that the world isn't
| binary - you can make comparisons and have similarities
| that are far apart on the spectrum so aren't equalities,
| but can still find informative meaning.
|
| But to your point, this exact argument was used by top
| southern politicians to justify slavery! It was the
| freedom _of the slave owner_ , their right to own
| property, that justified slavery. James Hammond famously
| made this argument to congress shortly before the Civil
| War broke out. If this is interesting to you, Eric Larson
| just released a great book called "The Demon of Unrest"
| that covers this.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| The point is understood, but it is a problem with
| copyright laws, and not only with the license.
|
| This is why I had suggested before, that if you cannot
| just abolish copyright laws, then to make the license
| which will allow freedom except that it cannot further
| restrict anyone by further copyright. No attribution is
| required, no notices of changes are required, etc; the
| only requirement is that any further restrictions you
| claim on your version will be invalid. This is therefore
| effectively similar than as though you did abolish
| copyright laws, but only this program. (However, for
| practical purposes, I had allowed to (optionally)
| relicense by GNU GPL3 and GNU AGPL3, although only if you
| are able to follow the terms of those licenses (e.g.
| having the source codes available, knowing who wrote the
| original code, etc).)
| unclenoriega wrote:
| Who are the slaves in this analogy?
| tristan957 wrote:
| I would say that the users are the slaves. Without GPL
| software, we could end up in situations where hardware
| vendors stop shipping software updates, so we are slaves
| to capitalism by having to buy things we shouldn't need
| to buy.
|
| This goes hand in hand with right to repair in my
| opinion.
| riwsky wrote:
| I don't think you're pro-slavery, but I do think you
| picked a metaphor not for the light it sheds on the
| issue, but the heat--and then preemptively dismissed a
| strawman objection to it instead of, say, improving your
| own communication.
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| You can copy GPL code, modify it and use it personally
| and nobody is going to care unless you're making tons of
| money. The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are
| massive and for profit.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are
| massive and for profit.
|
| I license all my stuff with permissive licenses because
| (in my opinion) they are more free than the GPL and such
| licenses. I don't have any massive for-profit company
| pushing me to do so. Mr. Kling is also not a massive for-
| profit company, he's just a guy making the software he
| wants to make. Your argument is in very bad faith.
| binary132 wrote:
| "Open source" was literally conceived and organized in
| its inception as a corporate-sponsored competitor to the
| threat of Free Software.
| mrighele wrote:
| > you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of
| your software.
|
| That's not true.
|
| Somebody can take the source code and build something
| closed on top of it, but the original code will be
| already free, and you will always have the right to see
| it.
|
| For example, PlayStation OS is based on FreeBSD (AFAIK).
| They took it, adapted it and added a lot of stuff. Did
| you lose the right to see the source code of FreeBSD ?
| No. Can you see the source code of PlayStation OS ? No,
| but you never had that right, so you have not been
| stripped of anything.
| freedomben wrote:
| GP is clearly talking about this is the same context that
| the GPL does. This is a decades-long running debate and
| it isn't as simple as you and the sibling commenters are
| trying to make it.
|
| _Of course_ it doesn 't change the original project. But
| when people take the codebase and build a _new_ product
| on it, what GP says is absolutely the case. The devs can
| withhold all code and rights to it from the next user.
| This is most commonly an issue when it comes to libraries
| rather than end products, but not always.
|
| It doesn't also have to mean that the original project
| dies or disappears, it can just rob from their growth
| potential. Examples are quite easy to find. There's been
| a big hullaballoo over cloud providers taking open source
| projects and competing with them by offering managed
| versions of the service that are well-integrated into
| their ecosystems. Economically this is also a problem
| because the cloud provider can then undercut the price of
| the managed service compared to the official one since
| they aren't bearing the burden of building/maintaining
| the codebase.
|
| I'm by no means against "permissive" licensing (MIT,
| etc), I think they have their time and place just like
| GPL, etc, but I am against dismissing valid concerns with
| shallow replies.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| as you said, this is a decades-long running debate, and
| pretty much every argument has been heard, ad nauseum.
| That makes this "valid concern" a pretty low-quality
| reply.
|
| The first freedom that GPL-lovers have is whether or not
| to use the project.
| binary132 wrote:
| Is a PlayStation user a FreeBSD user? Yes, clearly. Can
| he see the source code of the FreeBSD derivative he is
| using? No, obviously not. Did FreeBSD make this possible?
| Yes, obviously.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you
| allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your
| software.
|
| No you don't. You're being extremely disingenuous with
| this phrasing. No matter how many other parties take the
| source code and make a closed source product out of it,
| the users of your software will always have the same
| rights you granted them to begin with. No freedom has
| been lost.
|
| And before you say "but your users won't have the same
| rights to the derivative works", that isn't a loss of
| freedom. They _never had_ those rights to begin with,
| therefore they cannot lose them. Not gaining something is
| _not_ the same as losing it.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Less permissive licenses protect users more.
|
| https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-
| really-t...
| endgame wrote:
| This seems very important given how KHTML lead to the current
| near-monoculture in the browser space.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The BSD license protects user freedoms just fine.
| trustno2 wrote:
| The guy used to work for Apple at WebKit team.
|
| So he knows that corporations can take open source browsers
| and make it proprietary.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| This is a welcome initiative speaking from a personal and
| professional perspective, and as CEO of an independent search
| engine; we are all too well aware of the power of money and
| defaults.
|
| This immediately comes to mind as akin to the Signal vis-a-vis
| WhatsApp etc. Here there is an obvious reason to use Signal and
| a well-understood proposition. What might it be for Ladybird?
| And how will you differentiate?
| awesomekling wrote:
| To be honest, we are so far behind everyone else today that
| we're 100% focused on catching up technically, and not
| thinking much about differentiation. :)
|
| That said, I do think we'll find ways to differentiate given
| our uncommon situation with no ties to the advertising
| industry. This gives us the ability to experiment with
| privacy measures more aggressive than others may be
| comfortable with for fear of losing funding, for example.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| With no ties, direct AND indirect, that does make Ladybird
| uncommon, like Pale Moon.
|
| Our own approach to privacy is as radical as it gets in
| search: "No Tracking, Just Search". As we often say:
| tracking, not ads, is the fundamental problem. Contextual
| ads do not need necessarily to have tracking. Though the
| duopoly of search ad networks makes that a hard road too.
|
| Good luck. Excited to see how Ladybird progresses.
| kosolam wrote:
| Hey Andreas! Why you don't just fork the code of Firefox or
| Chromium's and start from that point, building a Browser
| company like some others?
| awesomekling wrote:
| Hey kosolam! There are already many forks and ports of
| existing browsers. Do we really need another one? :)
|
| By building a new engine, we can increase ecosystem diversity
| and put all these open standards to the test. We regularly
| find, report, and sometimes even fix bugs in the various web
| standards - stuff we find just by being the first to try and
| implement everything from scratch in a long time!
|
| We also believe it's good for the world to have more engines
| that aren't directly or indirectly funded primarily by the
| advertising industry.
| criddell wrote:
| Relying on open standards is risky. It seems to me the de
| facto standard is whatever Chrome or Blink does.
| ykonstant wrote:
| That's the unique value proposition of Ladybird. It uses
| the open standards as the jumping point, investigates and
| de facto documents the divergence of modern browsers from
| them. It is a precious and important work.
| criddell wrote:
| How is knowing where the published standards diverge from
| de facto standards precious and important work? You say
| that's where the value is, but the subset of people and
| organizations who would pay for that (if it's valuable,
| people will pay, right?) has to be pretty small.
| ykonstant wrote:
| >(if it's valuable, people will pay, right?)
|
| No? There are tons of valuable contributions, pure and
| applied, that "people" (markets) do not pay for at all,
| or pay pittance relative to their usefulness.
| paddim8 wrote:
| It makes it much easier to build new engines in the
| future. Even if only a few people are interested in this
| knowledge, they can make a big impact with the software
| they write.
| bn-l wrote:
| So freaking cool
| Sammi wrote:
| Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari's default
| search engine. They paid half a billion to be Firefox's
| default search engine.
|
| Here's a tweet with a couple of diagrams that illustrate how
| much control Google has over all browsers (including Firefox
| and Safari):
| https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1793937129250214344
| hurutparittya wrote:
| I'm also curious about this. When it was just a toy project
| it made sense to write everything from scratch. If it's
| supposed to eventually be usable by people, a hard fork of
| Chromium, or at least some Chromium components might make
| more sense. Having a browser that improves hackability and
| user freedom while working just as well as Chromium sounds
| like heaven to me. Anyways, I'm clueless about browser
| development so I might be completely wrong.
| wwwwwwwweb wrote:
| > we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to
| maintain. ...We are actively evaluating a number of
| alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to
| the project in the near future. This process is already quite
| far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.
|
| What languages have prototypes and where can I learn more?
| awesomekling wrote:
| We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100%
| chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)
| kamov wrote:
| Whatever language you end up choosing, I hope it will be a
| memory safe one. Browsers' main purpose is to interact with
| the outside world, and they even have to run third party
| code (JS) all the time, so minimizing attack surface would
| go a long way I think
| awesomekling wrote:
| Yes, our next language will be a memory safe one.
| ArtixFox wrote:
| pls pls pls go for one of those languages with some level
| of formal verification! it'd be soo cool to see a
| formally verified browser!
|
| But, ladybird is one of the coolest things I saw in
| 2024!!!
| ykonstant wrote:
| Clearly there is a furious internal war between CLispers
| and Haskellers!
| ledgerdev wrote:
| My favorite type of discussion! Language choice would seem
| super important long, long term and could provide long run
| advantage over other engines. Given the goals and
| philosophy of Ladybird zig seems like a complementary
| choice, and headed in the same direction in terms of
| community and freedom. And Perhaps just a sprinkle of
| something more verifiable than zig on the edges where
| correctness and safety are super critical. Have a look into
| tigerbeatle (https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blo
| b/main/docs/TI...) and their philosophy.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| How does ladybird compare to Servo?
|
| https://servo.org/
| rizky05 wrote:
| Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the
| whole thing.
| awesomekling wrote:
| I can't speak for Servo, but my understanding is that they
| have very different goals than we do.
|
| Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets
| of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and
| parallelism.
|
| Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web,
| warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness.
|
| I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success!
| Competition and new ideas in browser engines will benefit all
| of us! :)
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Servo wants to build an embeddable engine
|
| That's what they pivoted to after being expelled from
| Mozilla, but that wasn't the original goal, was it? It's
| the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security
| evaporated.
|
| (Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to
| point out the retcon here.)
| spankalee wrote:
| It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the
| engine for a new browser.
| mminer237 wrote:
| You can download Servo right now and use it as a browser:
| https://servo.org/download/
|
| It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable
| state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Agreed, I really hope that someday we'll get a full rust
| browser, because rust is a language where I could see
| myself contributing (e.g. fixing bugs that annoy me when
| using it all day) to it, compared to other languages like
| C/C++.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| >that wasn't the original goal
|
| They always aimed for a better embeddable story than
| Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and
| processing.
|
| > It's the safer(?) one they turned to when the job
| security evaporated.
|
| Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe
| rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a
| parallel context.
| trustno2 wrote:
| The talk about correctness gets me thinking.
|
| If there is a difference between how specs define
| something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them
| to behave), will you choose technical correctness or
| websites actually functioning?
|
| Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs
| XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual
| usability.
| the_duke wrote:
| Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does".
|
| Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome
| behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec
| was rejected/not agreed upon.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the
| spec". It's just made by Google.
| networked wrote:
| I have _two_ questions, if you don 't mind.
|
| 1. Legacy hardware support. Is it a goal for Ladybird to build
| for 32-bit and big-endian CPUs out of the repository?
|
| 2. Electron. Do you have any plans to work on an Electron
| alternative based on Ladybird further down the line? No free
| Electron alternative other than Sciter seems to use the same
| browser engine on all platforms. There may be value in one that
| implements the latest web standards.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Maybe item (2) is more up Servo's alley than what Ladybird is
| trying to do? Servo seem to be focusing on making an
| embeddable engine, Ladybird is intended to be a full
| browser...
| awesomekling wrote:
| 1. We are not focusing on legacy hardware support. Given our
| release date is far in the future, we are mainly targeting
| the kind of devices most people will have a few years from
| now.
|
| 2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of
| possibilities.
| lukan wrote:
| "2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of
| possibilities."
|
| Sounds good. If it also makes it into Serenty OS
| eventually, it would suddenly make Serenety OS a lot more
| accessible and useful for way more people. But I think you
| are aware of this and also of the challenges.
|
| Building a working browser is hard enough on its own.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Holy cheeseballs! That's amazing. Big congrats, you deserve it
| :D
| pkphilip wrote:
| Andreas, this is awesome :)!
|
| But please do consider putting up some screenshots of the
| browser - including how it renders the popular sites.
| fouc wrote:
| I remember watching one of the early videos of you starting
| working on the browser, and you said something along the lines
| of wanting a browser that was sort of a dumb renderer - one
| that didn't attempt to be a whole Operating System.
|
| Does Ladybird still follow that ideal?
| awesomekling wrote:
| That was a long time ago indeed! To be honest, I think I was
| partly saying that because I was scared of the idea of
| supporting the entire web platform. It seemed so far away at
| the time. :)
|
| Going forward, we want to support the open web as it exists,
| so you can actually use Ladybird to interact with all your
| websites. We may not agree that every web platform API is
| awesome and perfect, but we will honor the open standards to
| the best of our ability.
| mysterydip wrote:
| It's been so refreshing watching this project blossom from
| literally almost nothing. I wish you success :) Hopefully I can
| contribute at some point because I think this browser has the
| best chance of shaking up the monopoly, and I want to daily
| drive it.
| Oxodao wrote:
| What's your point of view about quirks as you can find in other
| browsers and how do you plan to handle websites that rely on
| unintended browser behavior ?
| awesomekling wrote:
| These days, all major browsers are taking interoperability
| very seriously. There's even efforts like the annual "Interop
| 202x" where people vote on which interop bugs browsers should
| focus on fixing.
|
| We benefit greatly from this of course, and we will do what
| we can to contribute when we're mature enough!
|
| That said, there will always be websites relying on bugs, and
| for that we will need a way to selectively emulate alternate
| behaviors in some cases. We are looking at a few different
| solutions for this but it's not a huge priority right now as
| there are far lower hanging fruit in front of us.
| Oxodao wrote:
| Thanks! Good luck with your project, this single-handedly
| gave me back faith in the modern web when I found out a few
| month ago about the progress you guys made since I last saw
| it
| account42 wrote:
| Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called
| impossible task of developing a new independent browser is
| awesome to see. It brings a glimmer of hope that the internet
| is not doomed to be ruled by advertising companies with only a
| stagnant controlled opposition browser as the alternative.
|
| That said, Ladybird is obviously far from becoming the daily
| driver for the average webizen. What do you think is going to
| be the first milestone where Ladybird is going to be able to be
| a real alternative (even if limited to certain use cases) and
| in what timeframe do you think this can be accomplished?
|
| Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to improve
| the web browsing experience beyond what existing browsers
| provide or is your focus entirely on the engine catching up for
| now?
| awesomekling wrote:
| > What do you think is going to be the first milestone where
| Ladybird is going to be able to be a real alternative (even
| if limited to certain use cases) and in what timeframe do you
| think this can be accomplished?
|
| At the moment, we are focusing primarily on our own use cases
| as developers, since those are the easiest to test and
| qualify. So websites like GitHub, web specifications, MDN,
| etc. are likely going to be very high fidelity before other
| parts of the web catch up ;)
|
| > Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to
| improve the web browsing experience beyond what existing
| browsers provide or is your focus entirely on the engine
| catching up for now?
|
| We are definitely focused on the engine catching up right
| now. There is an incredible amount of work to do, and we're
| doing the best we can :)
| acedTrex wrote:
| I think thats a very smart plan, get the websites that devs
| frequent up and running relatively reliably to help drive
| more dev use and therefore more willing contributors.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-
| called impossible task of developing a new independent
| browser is awesome to see
|
| Well the impossibility isn't so much in making a browser but
| making a browser that manages to get a chunk of web audience.
|
| That means presence on mobile, feature and performance parity
| with Chrome, surprasing Chrome on some level (e.g. Safari
| having better vendor lock-in).
| nwienert wrote:
| Safari is better than Chrome in many ways, arguably most.
| talldayo wrote:
| A fact that appears to be lost on the majority of users
| that have a say in what browser they use:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/desktop/worl...
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy
| consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore
| (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features
| are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS
| apps territory.
| nwienert wrote:
| The features missing thing was true years ago, but Apple
| significantly increased their investment in Safari about
| 3 years ago and it really gained ground. If you subtract
| all the Chrome-invented features, they aren't too far
| off.
| mjaniczek wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the impossibility advertised back then was
| also about just making a browser.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| Just wanted to add a note for the roadmap: Please make sure it
| can compete with Safari on battery usage, so those who are
| mobile on a Mac are not left behind.
|
| Best of luck!
| dailykoder wrote:
| Will it block ads are have the ability to run extensions to do
| so? I can't use modern web without an ad blocker
| awesomekling wrote:
| We will absolutely have the ability to block ads. The web is
| downright unpleasant without this feature!
| jchw wrote:
| I don't have much to add here, just wanted to say that I think
| this is a tremendous gift to the Internet that we loved. It
| would suffice to say that after many hard reality checks I
| don't really feel like there are any browser vendors that feel
| like good stewards of the open web, and it seemed like a new
| browser that actually managed to break out would be
| infeasible... until Ladybird showed up. And now, I'm typing
| this reply in Ladybird.
|
| Of course, it has a long way to go before it is going to be a
| good daily driver, but I truly believe this is the beginning of
| something great. I've been consistently surprised by what
| works, and the rate of improvement is staggering at times.
|
| My question: Has anyone given any thoughts regarding the stance
| to take with DRM features, e.g. Widevine/Encrypted Media
| Extensions? It seems like since our previous stewards of the
| open web didn't care enough, now making a browser with
| substantial marketshare without this may be hard. Seems like a
| hard problem, I really do wonder where Ladybird will stand if
| it continues on its current lightning fast trajectory.
| ledgerdev wrote:
| Hey please be sure to design and at least mock out a way to
| host/run a collection of local LLM models in a generic manner.
| You could give the models access to context/content/history and
| to bubble up functionality within the browser. I can see tons
| of potential for something trusted and local which I'm
| comfortable giving full access to browsing history and not
| owned by big tech.
|
| This could be key differentiator over other browsers.
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree, though this does not seem like something that should
| be built until the browser is at least usable, which
| currently they're projecting an alpha release in 2026. By
| then things might be totally different, so don't architect
| yourself into a corner with it, but I also wouldn't invest
| much or any time into it right now. Focus on building good
| APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely
| useful whether for local LLMs, extensions, or anything.
| ledgerdev wrote:
| Yeah, wasn't thinking about actually building it out, just
| mocking it out and taking into consideration to allow for
| it as you build out browser. So much easier to plan for
| rails, rather than foist into something later on.
|
| edit: > Focus on building good APIs/extension points
| though, and those will be immensely useful whether for
| local LLMs.
|
| I think we're saying the same thing, focus on good
| extension points for the local LLM use case.
| freedomben wrote:
| Are you working full time on this now? How many people are
| working on it and about how much time per week are they able to
| do? Is this expected to hold steady or do expect changes over
| the coming weeks, months, or years?
|
| Not trying to pry into your personal lives, just wondering
| because there's a lot of meaningful information behind the
| answers to those questions.
| awesomekling wrote:
| Yes! I'm already working on it full time, along with 3
| employees. In the next month, we are bringing on 3 more.
|
| Given the limitations of our funding model, we won't be
| building a huge team, but rather a small team that allows us
| to maintain a runway of at least 1.5 years. :)
| klohto wrote:
| is there still space on your crew? i'd love to join, should i
| just start committing?
| awesomekling wrote:
| We're always open to new developers! Find a website that
| doesn't work right, then try to figure out why, and see if
| you can fix it :)
|
| The best for a beginner is usually to start with some simple
| page you made yourself, since you know how it's supposed to
| work, and can debug more easily.
|
| And come join us on Discord, there are new people getting
| into the codebase all the time :)
| klohto wrote:
| Thanks Andreas! Completely forgot about the current Discord
| meta.
| rurban wrote:
| Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi
| mikkelam wrote:
| I absolutely adore your coding videos where you implement new
| features. Any chance we'll get more of those with Ladybird?
| vrinsd wrote:
| Hi Andreas,
|
| First, thanks for this project and making your self accessible!
|
| Will "plug-in" or "add-on" support be a first-party concept in
| Ladybird?
|
| I ask that because in years past a few other browsers
| (Konqueror, Falkon, Dillo, etc) made it pretty far but lacking
| add-ons, useful capability such as 'NoScript' or 'uBlock' or
| even a tab manager made them non-starters.
| pmlnr wrote:
| NoScript for Dillo makes no sense as it doesn't support JS
| anyway. uBlock... yeah, a little, but most annoyances will be
| blocked by the lack of JS support anyway.
|
| Plus there are plugins for dillo... https://dillo-
| browser.github.io/#plugins
| zzo38computer wrote:
| The plugins for Dillo are only protocol plugins; there are
| no file format plugins and no other kinds of plugins.
| However, I mentioned they should implement file format
| plugins too; other people also wanted this, and it does
| seem to be wanted enough that they might do it. (Other
| plugins will be more complicated to consider how to support
| it)
| gigatexal wrote:
| Exactly. I need 1Password and a vim mode plugin for me to
| be productive on the web.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I would hope that plug-ins and add-ons can be written in C
| (although any extensions written in C should be only allowed
| if installed manually by the end user (e.g. by adding it to
| some configuration file); it should never install them
| automatically from a "app store" or similar). That is a
| feature I would use.
| matlin wrote:
| Do you see Ladybird beating the incumbent browsers in any
| dimension .e.g. performance, usability?, security, etc?
|
| Personally, I much prefer developing for the web than native so
| if there were APIs exclusive to Ladybird it might create a nice
| virtuous cycle of developers targeting Ladybird to do new
| things and users using Ladybird to try those new experiences.
| selykg wrote:
| As someone who has very little experience working on a browser,
| but is interested in helping, could you possibly recommend
| where a dumb dude that wants to help could get started?
|
| There's probably a huge influx of people trying to get involved
| now, which probably really complicates and muddies the waters
| right now as well.
|
| Either way, congrats!
| dgreensp wrote:
| Where on the roadmap is GPU compositing? In modern browser
| programming, I kind of take for granted that I can control the
| rendering "layers" and certain CSS properties, like
| "transform," will be accelerated.
|
| Edit: In Blink, the layer/compositing system extends to SVG
| elements inside SVG tags, as well, and in WebKit, it doesn't
| yet, but there is an active years-long effort going back to
| 2019 that will eventually land:
| https://youtu.be/WxqJFxiprrU?si=dhQIgW1V4yS_Ca4s Compositing
| and using the GPU seems like a complex but important part of
| rendering in a browser, and a case where it could be good to
| implement the kind of system that other browsers have arrived
| at after years of iteration, when it comes time to do so.
|
| Will the JS engine still be LibJS?
| gigatexal wrote:
| Andreas you and your story and your passion for the open web
| and open tech and your merry band of hackers are going to save
| the web. Bravo to you and the community that is helping to pull
| this off. I'll be donating to help.
|
| Here's hoping one day I can move to LadyBird and leave the
| others behind.
|
| Bravo again.
| dxxvi wrote:
| What can you do with $1M? Writing a web browser is difficult,
| so the salary for 1 developer is about $300k/year. Then you can
| have 3 developers. Can 3 developers create a web browser in a
| year? I don't think so. If those 3 developers can do that, then
| they'll ask for more than $400k/yr/person. That means, IMO,
| this project will go nowhere. However, any project that can
| create jobs is good, in fact very good.
| input_sh wrote:
| I really appreciate someone taking a stab at a project of this
| scale, but is it really worth discussing for like the 70th time
| when even the alpha is two years away?
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ladybird
| darby_nine wrote:
| This is only the second time i've seen this project so maybe
| this is just your perspective.
| input_sh wrote:
| Twenty hours ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954
|
| Also twenty hours ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951
|
| One day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838973
|
| Along with 60 other threads you can see by clicking the link
| I posted.
| theshackleford wrote:
| I guess we do because I'm here every day and it's the first
| I've seen it.
| darby_nine wrote:
| I personally am not on HN 24/7 so for my own sake I
| appreciate it getting posted frequently enough for me to
| see it.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Seems only 3 submissions from homepage, all within 1 day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ladybird.org
|
| Can assume site was set-up yesterday and people are
| submitting it without checking if others did too.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| I think it shows that people are interested in seeing new
| browsers that are not based on Webkit/Chrome that are not
| called Firefox.
| tokai wrote:
| Flag, hide, and move along if you have an issue with the
| links getting to the top.
| cpach wrote:
| It's okey to flag duplicates, the poster won't get penalized.
| input_sh wrote:
| Of course I flag them, but I feel like at this point people
| just post every conceivable URL related to this pre-alpha
| project for free karma.
|
| Oh the homepage was discussed yesterday? Let's add
| /index.html and resubmit it!
| bowsamic wrote:
| Also some accounts have flagging disabled ie your flags
| might not do anything
| account42 wrote:
| I'd rather see duplicate post for interesting projects than yet
| another LLM grift.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Best of luck. If these guys succeed medium to long term they also
| prove it's actually possible to build a browser if you focus on
| building a browser and not anything else.
|
| It would be a statement of hope that we are not condemned to
| Google's corporate strategy and the absolute rot the Mozilla
| foundation has become.
|
| I know pretty much everything is not in their favor but I truly
| believe it's still possible for a couple of guys with their head
| between their shoulders to actually "change the World". I need to
| sleep at night after all.
| mudkipdev wrote:
| The redesign looks soulless
| kome wrote:
| true. extremely boring. a bare html would looks so much better.
| this one is not utilitarian and is not aesthetic either. it
| hits the intersection between banality, uglyness and lacks of
| function - because it is structured like a brochure, wasting a
| lot of space on stock photos.
| freilanzer wrote:
| Also, where is the actual ladybug? It's not in the logo.
| netvl wrote:
| FWIW it's ladybird, not ladybug :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete
| with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by
| some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2
| allows that.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Why is that such a problem other than the human factor of
| seeing your code being used by some guys you don't like?
| zogrodea wrote:
| I think the issue isn't the potential forking, but that the
| potential fork may become a dominant and closed one.
|
| If one values the web being somewhat open/less monopolistic,
| an open source web browser would be more appealing.
|
| I have faith in the Ladybird browser project to avoid such a
| situation though.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| It supports capitalistic predatory tactics that erode our
| society. Better to exclude them...
| bayindirh wrote:
| > seeing your code being used by some guys you don't like?
|
| This is not even in the list of my concerns. I just don't
| like to see efforts of hundreds if not thousands of
| volunteers are rolled into a closed source application and
| distributed for the profit of a couple of people who pat
| themselves on the back because they got their next
| car/house/whatever for free.
|
| This is why I prefer GPL over BSD/MIT.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That sounds no different from "code being used by some guys
| you don't like" to me, to be honest. If some company took
| my permissively licensed work and turned it into a
| commercial product, why would I take issue? I put my work
| out there for the betterment of all, and it is still
| bettering the world even in its new form. I have no
| complaints with that.
| bayindirh wrote:
| In fact, it's very different. You, as a single person
| might not care about a patch you contributed, or a small
| utility you have written. However, not everyone thinks
| like you (e.g.: Me, as Fig. 1a).
|
| When you put all this spectrum of views under a project,
| it becomes another thing to manage these expectations and
| what people want from the project in the end. When big
| shifts start to occur, people will react differently.
|
| When it's a project people love and contribute with the
| expectation of keeping things the way it's, and the
| things change, people won't be happy. See: Go's opt-out
| by default telemetry proposal, HashiCorp's and Docker's
| license changes, Google's persistent push to block ad-
| blockers, Microsoft's breaking of VSCodium in subtle
| ways, etc.
|
| So it's much more than you and your code, esp. in
| projects like these. I think licensing them with licenses
| allowing rug-pulls (esp. under community itself), is a
| red-flag in many cases.
|
| I also put the code I develop myself out there for the
| betterment of all, but it's licensed with GPL, because I
| don't want someone take and run away with it for
| "betterment of themselves rather than everyone". Now, you
| might not agree with me, and I respect that, but that's
| the terms I put on my code. As I always say. If you like
| it that much, reimplement it. I don't care.
|
| Conversely, I contribute to a project which allows no GPL
| code, because it's designed to be both open, and be
| customized and closed at the same time. We put it out
| very openly in the beginning, because that license is a
| requirement for the use case we (as in ~10 countries)
| have, and MIT is the best one for our use case.
|
| ...but, Ladybird is not that. The project tries to build
| an important, foundational commodity item. Allowing it to
| be taken private is a mistake, IMO.
| rice7th wrote:
| And so? Yes people (and companies) would fork your code, but
| the most realistic scenario would be that the original ladybird
| would still be the most relevant browser of it's family, just
| like firefox, so the problem kinda resolves by itself
| bayindirh wrote:
| Then why KDE's Konqueror is not the most prominent browser of
| the KHTML family, but Safari is?
| efilife wrote:
| Imagine if ladybird gets used regularly by ~1000 nerds, which
| is its current audience, then gets forked by microsoft and
| the current ME gets replaced by ladybird. Even if ladybird
| got over 9000 users, there's no competing with megacorps.
|
| Also, its* not it's
| paddim8 wrote:
| Well maybe they're ok with that? They want browser
| diversity. Getting Microsoft to use a new engine is better
| for diversity than if they just used chromium like now.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Getting Microsoft to use a new engine and contribute back
| to the original repository is better for diversity, but
| forking and running away with it is certainly not.
| beretguy wrote:
| > Getting Microsoft to use a new engine and contribute
| back to the original repository is better for diversity
|
| Oh no no no. We don't need microsoft contributing
| anything into this. They will mess up everything and push
| their agenda.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Ideally, yes. Microsoft should stay away from this, but I
| wanted to highlight that adopting a technology doesn't
| automatically make it better for diversity.
|
| Google was almost killing Go overnight because they
| wanted more user data from people using the language.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Forking and running away with it is certainly not
|
| If your goal is browser diversity, this would take an
| ecosystem of 2 browser engines and turn it into an
| ecosystem of 4. That seems in-line with the goal of
| browser diversity.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Currently we have an ecosystem of two browser engines,
| yes. One of them is weaponized against users by its
| designers, both in its open and closed form.
|
| Having 4 (or 3.5 more realistically) browser engines
| where 2 of them weaponized against its users doesn't
| change things.
|
| Instead, we should have 3 (or 2.5) browser engines where
| only one of them is (and can be) weaponized against its
| users. This is what brings diversity and change.
| rty32 wrote:
| If you the amount of features in Chrome and Firefox (just those
| in the standard, nothing extra), you would know "mature well to
| compete" is a long way away, if not impossible.
|
| And I don't see any problem with forking. Tons of browser bugs
| were found, reported and fixed exactly because companies forked
| them. And remember that Blink is forked from Webkit.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have seen IE's rise and fall. Netscape's rise, burn and
| rebirth as Firefox, saw Safari as a fork of KHTML and rise of
| Chrome.
|
| Ladybird might be added to this list. It's not impossible.
| It'll be a winding and hard road to go, but it is not a path
| with no end.
|
| You don't need to fork a codebase to fix its bugs. It's
| GitHub's workflow (fork -> PR -> merge). What I meant, as
| noted in this thread, is a hard and closed fork propelled
| with money and corporate greed, which eclipses the open and
| primary version and drown it in the process.
|
| EEE'ing it, basically. This is why I prefer GPL (preferably
| V3+). If you want to improve it, it's open. If you want to
| monetize and EEE it, then nah. It's not allowed.
| infecto wrote:
| Lots of big assumptions there.
|
| 1) Ladybird matures with a community around it.
|
| 2) A company actually cares enough to fork it.
|
| 3) Said fork becomes the dominant version.
|
| 4) Company closes down fork.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yeah,
|
| I did these assumptions because I saw potential in the
| project and witnessed the cycle enough times to worry about
| its future.
|
| On the other hand, it's a food for thought. Just to play with
| and explore the possibilities.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Personally am asking myself what the benefits of the BSD clause
| compared to a more restrictive license are. The only reason I
| personally can see is that they want to have to option to close
| the browser themself in the future.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Believe it or not, plenty of people prefer permissive
| licenses because they grant more freedom. Not everyone agrees
| with the GPL.
| bayindirh wrote:
| If you want ultimate freedom, just put it to public domain
| at the beginning.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| One advantage of BSD license being not as complicated as GPL.
| Toorkit wrote:
| I'm too used to my Firefox with tree-style tabs and Vim controls
| to go back to a regular layout.
|
| This also makes me a bit of a tab hoarder, though.
|
| I'd say "I'll be keeping an eye on this," but I'm sure there'll
| be plenty of posts about Ladybird before the alpha even drops,
| haha.
| vaylian wrote:
| > I'm too used to my Firefox with tree-style tabs and Vim
| controls to go back to a regular layout.
|
| Tree-style tabs could be a core feature. Maybe this is
| something you can contribute to the project?
| sleepycatgirl wrote:
| I certainly would consider trying to contribute, but.. After
| seeing the drama.. Nah. Not here. Not now. Still, happy to
| see a new browser engine, alongside servo.
| amne wrote:
| "built on web standards" - I believe it needs critical mass of
| both websites and installs for this to be a feature when the
| mainstream browser has hardcoded quirks.
|
| Also, I am very curious why is someone like Shopify sponsoring
| this.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not the little spout! Please, any picture but the little sprout.
| account42 wrote:
| They could at least have selected one with a ladybird climbing
| on it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I feel like the public perception of this project will become
| significantly more harsh now that it has upgraded from a hobby
| project, and I'm not sure they're prepared for that
| mronetwo wrote:
| Nitpick (or is it?) but the website is soulless and just bad. The
| website design communicates that this is just another immature
| project, desperately looking for a VC funding, just following
| modern design trends where "design == aesthetics". Yuck.
|
| I am happy to see the project thrive.
| bezier-curve wrote:
| Have to agree, though I think as the saying goes, "don't hate
| the playa, hate the game". Capitalism sucks. Sorry for my non-
| HN-like comment, but it's the truth.
| rchaud wrote:
| > "don't hate the playa, hate the game"
|
| That might play if this was another Chromium fork, instead of
| something built from scratch.
| aniviacat wrote:
| I don't know if that's true for non-developers. (Of course non-
| developers aren't the target _yet_ , but they hopefully will be
| in the future.) I'd assume that non-developers are usually the
| main audience for a project website like this.
|
| Developers can simply look at the Github readme and get their
| near plain text overview there.
| Sammi wrote:
| Where's the Ladybird??
| prettymuchnoone wrote:
| they got rid of it :(
| ohmyiv wrote:
| > Nitpick (or is it?)
|
| We're all nitpicking no matter what our thoughts are on the
| design. I have my own thoughts on the design, but I'm more
| excited about the product than to put any more care in what the
| website looks like. It's easy enough to ignore and doesn't have
| an effect on the product.
| trustno2 wrote:
| This is a textbook definition of bikeshedding though
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| > 501(c)(3) non-profit
|
| How come a european project becomes an american foundation?
| rizky05 wrote:
| Money of course.
| tokai wrote:
| Cause its not a european project.
| lkramer wrote:
| That's an interesting question...
| account42 wrote:
| I too would have preferred to see an EU-based organization
| backing this but I can imagine that a US non-profit probably
| makes it easier to get funding from US corporations and donors.
| wordofx wrote:
| 2026? It's so far away it will prob be forgotten by the time
| anyone can use it...
| master-lincoln wrote:
| 2 years is far away? You must be very young or very close to
| death I assume... It doesn't need to be remembered until then.
| If it matures and gets usable you will read about it again ;)
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one be not young and
| close to death?
|
| Sorry sometimes I get a bit existential.
| account42 wrote:
| Colloquially, "or" can but doesn't have to be exclusive. As
| to your question, being young and close to death are both
| states that everyone gets to experience (even if not
| neccessarily knowingly for the latter) but thankfully most
| of us are spared from experiencing them simultaneously.
| janandonly wrote:
| Haven't we seen a post about Ladybird just last week already? Or
| am i confusing my independent broswers now?
| resurge wrote:
| I checked my RSS history because I was thinking the same. (My
| rss feed only contains posts that get popular on HN, there
| might be more posts in reality)
|
| - This post
|
| - Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951
|
| - 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746804
|
| - 4 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560768
|
| Anyway, I don't mind that much. I hope they succeed.
| slackstation wrote:
| Seems a bit ambitious for only less than a dozen full-time
| engineers in two years.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| I was thinking the exact opposite. Considering what they
| already have, 2 years seems very far away for an initial alpha.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Firefox and Chromium have 30+ million lines of code
| (excluding comments and blank lines). You underestimate the
| complexity of a web browser.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Oh for sure, browsers are complex beasts, but Ladybird
| already supports quite a decent chunk of the web. For an
| initial alpha (which they explicitly point out to be for
| developers and early adopters) to still be 2 years away
| feels a bit far out to me.
| xcv123 wrote:
| The alpha release is intended to be fully functional, in
| the usual sense of alpha testing. That is ambitious. It's
| not like a shitty game on Steam (or Star Citizen) where
| "alpha" means 10% of features completed. That is 30
| million lines of complexity due within 2 years. Ignoring
| lines of code, some of these problems within a browser
| are time consuming and difficult to solve from scratch.
| paddim8 wrote:
| Do you know who Andreas is? He knows more than you.
| xcv123 wrote:
| What are you talking about?
| hipinspire wrote:
| It is a great honor to see a website I designed and coded at the
| top of the Hacker News front page! A big thank you to Chris
| Wanstrath for allowing me to work on it. I hope Ladybird becomes
| a mainstream browser, and I feel this is a moment similar to when
| Firefox rebranded from Phoenix.
|
| P.S. Check out my UI/UX portfolio at https://hipfolio.co
| awesomekling wrote:
| Thank you for making the website! :)
| hipinspire wrote:
| Thank you, Andreas! Keep up the great work!
| marvinborner wrote:
| It's really rare to see websites that look modern while still
| being very minimal and fast. No JS, no frameworks - great job!
| hipinspire wrote:
| Thank you! Coming from an OS developer, it's a great honor!
| chappi42 wrote:
| It's beautiful! -- Cool that Chris Wanstrath gives massive
| support to this project (financial and (most likely) time).
| hipinspire wrote:
| Thank you very much! That is right!
| parasti wrote:
| FYI, a couple of sections are cut off on mobile.
| hipinspire wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Could you please email a screenshot with
| the phone model, OS version, and browser name to the email
| address in my HN profile?
| starik36 wrote:
| Double checking my memory here. Didn't it go from Phoenix to
| Firebird to Firefox?
| hipinspire wrote:
| Great memory indeed!
|
| https://hicks.design/journal/firefox-logo?trk=feed-
| detail_co...
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| First "alpha" in Summer 2026. Ouch.
|
| I can imagine how hard it is to develop a browser. However, I
| can't imagine how much the landscape will change in the next 2
| years... LLM, privacy, etc.
| bennypowers wrote:
| Are you running the web platform tests?
| awesomekling wrote:
| Yes, but not automatically yet! We are actively working on our
| WPT infrastructure (which relies on a full Web Driver
| implementation) and running it manually at the moment. Once
| we've got it stable and automated, we'll look at pushing
| results to the common dashboard at https://wpt.fyi/ :)
| bennypowers wrote:
| Excellent! Thank you
| bn-l wrote:
| Shopify is a platinum sponsor. Big respect.
| awesomekling wrote:
| Indeed, Shopify was our first major sponsor, they signed up
| almost a year ago! I'm super grateful to Tobi for believing in
| us when we were even less mature than we are today. <3
| FireInsight wrote:
| I think people in this comment section are too harsh on the
| website. I think the design is pleasing and functional, and the
| project is communicated about clearly. The AI laptop is a bit of
| a shame, and the logo being bland instead of clever is a bummer,
| though. But plenty of products have a similar front page style,
| and it doesnt make me feel like it's a soulless startup.
| aquova wrote:
| I agree, after reading the comments, I was expecting a complete
| monstrosity, but it's a simple, informative website. That style
| of website design is used because it's appealing and easy to
| parse. I'm not sure what people were expecting.
|
| I must admit I'm not crazy about the logo though. It's fine at
| the top of a page, but I cant see it as my browser icon on my
| desktop, and it's much less appealing and identifiable than the
| old Ladybird.
| cfiggers wrote:
| I actually really like the logo. It's a simple, mathematically-
| defined curve that also resembles an abstract ladybird opening
| its wings. You don't find that clever?
| beretguy wrote:
| I'd rather see an actual ladybird somewhere than some
| facebook's new meta-like logo.
| robryan wrote:
| I think this is more for the end user. If the eventual goal is
| to convince people to use this instead of Chrome or Safari it
| is probably going to be a hard sell if it looks like a hobby
| project.
| lawn wrote:
| This is great and a truly independent web browser is surely one
| of the most important software projects we need today.
| major505 wrote:
| After mozzila turned itself into a advertising agency, is good
| that theres a new open source alternative. Been looking at
| ladybird for a while now. Can wait to see it grown.
| satyanash wrote:
| No talk of the license on the frontpage. Visiting the GitHub repo
| tells me it is 2-clause BSD license. It's high time we had a
| GPLv3 web browser, otherwise, this risks the same fate as the
| rest of the browsers with proprietary forks.
|
| This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support
| non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.
| fsflover wrote:
| > This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support
| non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.
|
| LGPLv3 would solve that, wouldn't it?
| i_read_news wrote:
| Or GPLv2 with binaries loaded at runtime, like Linux does.
| This is a definitive good candidate for v2 as not having DRM
| is simply just not going to work.
| account42 wrote:
| > This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support
| non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.
|
| That would be a benefit, not a cost.
| scubbo wrote:
| Absolutism like this hurts adoption of otherwise-useful
| tools. Given the choice between a tool which simply cannot
| play DRM-protected content, and a tool which can, _ceteris
| paribus_ most consumers will prefer the former. If you
| believe there are other properties of a proposed tool that
| mean it is a public good for it to be adopted, it behooves
| you to make it attractive to adopt.
| mouse_ wrote:
| I don't care if it's for most people. There needs to be at
| least one good option.
| zarzavat wrote:
| > It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser
|
| Then write one.
|
| Perhaps BSD in its anarchic freedom is compelling to the kinds
| of people who decide to do something crazy like building a
| brand new browser engine from scratch, and GPLv3 with its
| detailed rules and regulations is compelling to people who like
| to talk about how they wish the world had more software
| licensed under GPLv3.
|
| Open source isn't handed down from God, it starts with one
| person deciding to type mkdir.
| rty32 wrote:
| There is absolutely nothing wrong with have proprietary forks.
| They exist for good reasons -- either a new browser or get
| embedded in another product which provides value for their end
| users. They may (or may not) contribute back to the original
| projects with bug reports, fixes and features.
|
| Sorry this is not the GPLv3 everywhere world you are dreaming
| of, and I'm glad it works this way.
|
| Like others said, if you want to have a GPLv3 licensed browser
| (that will probably be as unusable as GIMP), write one
| yourself.
| greenyies wrote:
| I'm just not trusting a small browser dev team.
|
| The risk of exploits is too high
| xandrius wrote:
| And still written in C++, like c'mon, we are in 2024.
| efilife wrote:
| What would be a better option?
| vaylian wrote:
| The obvious answer is Rust. But I respect their choice of
| using an existing and probably well-tested C++ code base as
| a starting point.
| BirAdam wrote:
| But you'd trust a megacorporation closely tied to government
| that has an explicit interest in tracking you, keeping paths
| for intelligence agencies and law enforcement open, and
| generally being deceptive? You trust browsers that openly phone
| home about your activity?
| djeastm wrote:
| I gauge the risk of my government targeting me lower than the
| risk of hackers stealing/selling my information. Mainly
| because the latter has occurred to me numerous times already.
| greenyies wrote:
| Despite you painting it as extreme as you do, yes.
|
| Random exploits on the Internet are still a higher risk for
| me.
| fsflover wrote:
| If you're really this serious about security, you should be
| using Qubes OS. Then, a browser choice stops being important,
| since the strong isolation would prevent an exploit to do any
| damage. And disposable VMs allow to do insecure staff without
| any risk.
| greenyies wrote:
| I'm serious enough about security that I don't trust a very
| small dev teams skill set developing a browser for the
| Internet we have today.
| fsflover wrote:
| And I don't care if my browser is compromised, since the
| attacker would only get access to an empty VM on Qubes OS.
| greenyies wrote:
| I'm not switching my os to some obscure one for security
| and it doesn't make sense for me to isolate my browser
| from my system/files.
|
| And yes my mail account is more critical than my local
| files.
| fsflover wrote:
| Xen is not an obscure system. Hardware isolation was
| broken last time in 2006 by the Qubes founder ("Blue pill
| software").
|
| I open my email in a dedicated VM, so only my email
| provider could attempt to compromise me. Attachments are
| automatically opened in another, disposable VM.
| edent wrote:
| Is Ladybird going to be a member of the WHAT-WG?
| fguerraz wrote:
| Good luck.
|
| I mean it both in a sarcastic way and not.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Open source is great and new things are great and pursuing your
| passion is great. The rhetoric here however is lacking.
| Specifically the argument is "google money bad" but the authors
| don't provide specific examples where google money has caused a
| technical decision they disagree with.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of
| user monetization, ever.
|
| Is avoiding those sorts of things not supposed to be reason
| enough for them?
|
| Also the page does a good job of specifically mentioning Google
| and making general statements about what any source of funding
| can impact. If Google wanted to give an unrestricted donation
| it's not clear from this page they would decline it.
| josefresco wrote:
| What does Spotify gain by funding this project with $100K?
| rogerthis wrote:
| A brick in the ladder to open source heaven.
| obruchez wrote:
| You mean Shopify?
| BossingAround wrote:
| For anyone looking for a package to install, there are, sadly,
| none yet:
|
| > Ladybird is in a pre-alpha state, and only suitable for use by
| developers
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| Will it have multi-account containers, like Firefox? If not, I
| won't be using it.
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| Love the project, but that website is pretty cold and soulless
| (as mentioned by others).
|
| I quickly put together a "cleaner" design for anyone interested,
| which also uses the original (and objectively better) logo:
|
| https://ladybird-dev.netlify.app/
| beretguy wrote:
| I love this version SO MUCH BETTER. Clean, easy to read and I
| don't have to scroll down for half an hour to get to the
| bottom. I hate "modern design", whatever it is. To much
| padding, to much useless css and styles.
| aAaaArrRgH wrote:
| Hard disagree. If you're a fan of the strictly functional
| "what's CSS?" look, you might as well stick to viewing
| README.md on GitHub and call it a day.
| rchaud wrote:
| This design makes it look like something that is looking for
| developer contributions. The original looks like something
| where a sales chatbot is likely to pop up in the corner.
| kome wrote:
| This version is clearly superior, both in design and use. Great
| start!
| endemic wrote:
| Yeah, that original logo is way better. Kind of reminiscent of
| the Firefox logo before it got abstracted away into minimalism.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 1. "cold and soulless"
|
| 2. _gives black text white background_
|
| 3. now its "clean(er)"
|
| 4. "also your old logo is objectively better"
|
| This isn't design work.
| gitaarik wrote:
| Maybe it's because they want their website to work in their own
| browser ;)? I can see that if they start off simple with the
| browser, they start off simple with the website too, and it
| progressively grows with the browser.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Is there any caniuse data for Ladybird? It would be helpful to
| see which standards Ladybird implements so Ladybird users can use
| my site. Building websites that use the supported standards seems
| like a good way to support the project.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Better yet, build your site using the standards that make sense
| for you to use and then see what the browser needs changed to
| support it! Some things like webgpu are bigger lifts to make
| internal versions of but others like minor CSS properties tend
| to go quick.
| seumars wrote:
| I'm disappointed in the fact that the main ambition here is only
| to recreate a browser for the sake of independence. There is so
| much potential in creating a modern browser that could for
| instance focus on performance, privacy, access to lower level
| APIs, etc. rather than carrying the eternal burden of backwards
| compatibility.
| specialist wrote:
| Software dev maturity phases:
|
| get something working
|
| make it correct
|
| make it fast
|
| Having a vanilla green field working web browser could enable
| experimentation. Prototying a novel more useful hybrid history
| & bookmarks feature set, for instance, is a giant pain thru the
| current plugin extensions. Like sucking apples thru a soda
| straw. As you said about lower level APIs, it's easier to "go
| straight to the metal".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Announcement post: https://ladybird.org/announcement.html
|
| Probably merge these discussions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954
| fsflover wrote:
| Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40854836
| dang wrote:
| We merged that thread hither since the submission was more
| about the significant new information.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Hrrm. legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.ladybird
| (0-unstable-2024-06-04)
|
| Cool! Let's see if I can read HN. nix run
| nixpkgs#ladybird ... 502144.831
| Ladybird(1297933): WebContent process crashed! 502144.831
| Ladybird(1297933): WebContent has crashed 5 times in quick
| succession! Not restarting... ...
|
| I didn't expect it to work very well yet in a distro, so that's
| ok. It's cool enough that nix(os) has already started tracking
| it.
|
| I'll check back every few months and see how it's going!
| awesomekling wrote:
| Please don't trust random distro packages of Ladybird, we have
| no idea what they're packaging, but it's unlikely to be
| current, and not something we can help you with.
|
| I wish distros would not package pre-alpha software, since the
| only thing it accomplishes is giving people a bad first
| impression of something that isn't ready :(
|
| If you want to mess with Ladybird, build it from the source at
| https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird :)
| jchw wrote:
| I think the only reason why Nixpkgs has a derivation for
| Ladybird is because it is not really possible to build
| Ladybird (or really almost any software) the "obvious" way in
| NixOS. What Nixpkgs provides is more like build recipes that
| work within Nix's sandboxed environment with optionally
| cached binaries, rather than actual packages. Because of
| that, it's kind of awkward: no specific decision is ever made
| to publish packages for some unfinished software, it's just
| that the act of writing a derivation kind of implicitly does
| do that.
|
| Clearly, some upstreams do not appreciate that NixOS provides
| non-standard or sometimes-unfinished versions of their
| software, but it's either that or the software is essentially
| unusable and uncompilable on NixOS.
|
| I do wonder if there is a potential for productive
| compromise, though. Maybe it would be desirable to have a
| QMessageBox warning to the user at startup that the
| distribution is unsupported and bugs should not be reported
| upstream. I think that the folks maintaining the Ladybird
| derivation would be happy to take feedback into account.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Announcement post: https://ladybird.org/announcement.html
|
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951
| animanoir wrote:
| It will be eventually sold.
| awesomekling wrote:
| Which part, the nonprofit or the permissively licensed
| codebase? ;)
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Does awesomekling get to remain BDFL of Ladybird? I appreciated
| the project because it gave the impression that all the pork was
| stripped away and 100% focused on the engineering.
|
| Meanwhile Mozilla spends a massive chunk of money on the
| organization and the philanthropy and the blog posts, and the
| activism, and the salaries of people who have little resemblance
| to engineers.
| awesomekling wrote:
| I'm still the BDFL but my role is evolving a bit as I'm now
| also running the nonprofit.
|
| We are definitely a stripped down operation, and we will spend
| as much of our funding as possible on engineer salaries for the
| foreseeable future.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm curious how they will work. The lead dev made briliant coding
| / self-work videos, and I'm really wondering coding will happen
| on this project. I hope we can see more streams :)
|
| good luck
| arisu wrote:
| Sounds too good to be true. Well:
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Can anyone explain like I'm an idiot concrete reasons how Google
| Chrome's dominance is bad for the web? Preferably things that
| have actually happened, not what might happen
| stewx wrote:
| One answer: Google's interests are at cross-purposes. They are
| simultaneously making money from showing you advertisements,
| but also giving you a browser, and sometimes these conflict.
| For example, they recently rolled out a new on-by-default
| "feature" to identify yourself to advertisers.
|
| Another answer: concentration of power and market share stifles
| innovation. Look at what happened to Internet Explorer when
| Microsoft was the only game in town.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Google tried to get this through, and was only prevented
| because competing browsers didn't play along.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts
| skeaker wrote:
| What's wrong with looking at what might happen?
| spencerchubb wrote:
| That is also a fine question to ask. I was just curious about
| what has already happened because chrome has been the #1
| browser since 2013.
| metabagel wrote:
| Would you want to have all smart TVs manufactured by the
| dominant advertising company? How do you think that would turn
| out?
| parhamn wrote:
| IMO the more interesting question is "why not fork Chromium"?
| The corporate effects of a browser monopoly are pretty obvious.
|
| The less obvious question, and Im genuinely curious, is why do
| you need to rewrite the engines when there are at least 2 good
| compliant open source ones? The only way an engine rewrite is
| worthwhile is if yours is significantly leaner or faster, both
| seem very unlikely. An seemingly-impossible milestone of
| hitting party isnt that interesting, is it?
| Steuard wrote:
| You want to know why a monopoly is bad, using only evidence
| from when it was not yet a monopoly (or not quite)? That feels
| to me a bit like missing the point.
|
| I think for a lot of us on the older end, we lived through the
| era of Microsoft Internet Explorer dominating the web and that
| experience informs our thinking. As long as there was
| competition between MSIE and Netscape, with each one trying to
| outdo the other, both browsers kept getting better and the web
| kept becoming a more and more capable platform. But quite soon
| after Netscape crumbled and stopped being a serious competitor,
| MSIE stagnated: development didn't just slow but halted for
| half a decade. The web stagnated, too, and Microsoft's
| dominance meant that a lot of what did get built was locked in
| to their platform. (Partly things like CSS quirks and
| nonstandard rendering behaviors, and just plain neglect of new
| possibilities in HTML, JS, and CSS. But more than that: how
| many companies built ActiveX controls in that era, which mostly
| required Windows to function? The entire internet
| infrastructure of South Korea got locked in to ActiveX by law
| from about 1999 to 2020.) So imagining an era of Chrome
| monoculture brings back some pretty negative memories.
|
| I don't expect that Google would make the exact same mistakes
| that Microsoft made. But it would be awfully hard for them not
| to shape browser design around their own corporate interests if
| there were no competition driving innovation and no
| disincentive to shaping the entire future of the web platform
| in Google-friendly ways. I know that's not "things that have
| actually happened", but the whole point is that things change
| once an effective monopoly is achieved.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Chrome has been #1 since 2013 and reached peak dominance
| around 2018. Is that not enough time for evidence of whether
| it's good or bad?
| rchaud wrote:
| Since you wanted to restrict it to things that happened:
|
| - Chrome began to "log in" users into the browser by default,
| if they so much as logged in to Gmail or Youtube, or anything
| that uses Gmail ID oAuth. That means that all the searches and
| web visits made on the browser are explicitly tied to your
| Gmail ID.
| xcrjm wrote:
| It's a web browser built and controlled by an advertising giant
| in order to serve you monetized pages more quickly. For
| examples of why this is bad for the user, search FLoC and
| manifest V3, both of which they try to say are better for the
| user despite being objectively worse (the latter hobbles web ad
| blocker extensions and the former is a solution to "reasonable"
| web ads and user tracking).
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Google Accelerated Mobile Pages were one example of a dangerous
| pattern that Google pushed, for probably altruistic and selfish
| reasons.
|
| Less specific, but I think just as reasonable, is looking at
| the philosophical alignment and financial incentives of the
| organization behind the browser.
|
| Google's interests are often in direct misalignment to my own,
| and by virtue of that, I would strongly prefer them to not have
| such a position of power over the market.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| Impeding content blockers like uBlock Origin.
| rocketvole wrote:
| excuse my ingnorance, but firefox is also an open source browser
| afaik. The only advantage that ladybird us is that it turns the
| duopoly of browser engines into a tri-opoly- so what is the
| point? Why wouldn't this money be better spent enhancing another
| browser engine like whatever midori runs on? Why does Ladybird
| need to exist, and why are so many companies becoming sponsors?
| Not trying to ruffle feathers, genuinely curious
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 1. Would it have possibility to load extensions written in C by
| dlopen?
|
| 2. Would it have the features of the Line Mode Browser?
| daghamm wrote:
| For comparison, in 2022 Mozilla had $1.3B in assets and over
| $500M in revenue:
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
|
| I want ladybird to succeed and show the world how ridiculous the
| Mozilla situation has been.
| szastamasta wrote:
| As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot
| believe that you can sustain a browser development without
| millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for
| all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can
| catch up with this.
|
| There's only one way we can make sure we can get really
| independent browsers:
|
| SIMPLIFY THE WEB
|
| - Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way to render
| things, fetch stuff from the network, etc.
|
| - Get rid of CSS - leave just some basic rendering primitives, so
| libraries can be created to paint on the canvas. We don't need 78
| new animation primitives. We'll build them ourselves if we have a
| sensible canvas and execution platform.
|
| - Move JS out of the browser to a WebAssembly compiler and make
| browsers run only WebAssembly
|
| - Or keep JS in the browser but don't add any new features,
| features should be in libraries outside of the browser. Language
| should be as simple as possible.
|
| - Get rid of all semantic html junk. We only need some basic
| blocks to move things around.
|
| This way we can have simple browsers and move all complexity to
| client libraries, which you can pick and replace when needed.
| Just keep things as simple as possible and let people build on
| that.
|
| (updated whitespace)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| From a user experience, maintaining a large collection of
| "feature libraries" is about the last thing I want to do on top
| of web browsing. To me, this approach would doom the browser as
| needlessly nerdy and obtuse.
| szastamasta wrote:
| You already have this anyway. I'm not sure you have seen the
| size of average page js bundle. It's many MBs of JS. All this
| while expanding browser APIs like crazy during last few
| years. Simplify the platform and let people brew.
| freedomben wrote:
| Any browser could do that tomorrow, and then their users will
| promptly abandon it when it doesn't work for websites they have
| to access. This will just never be a viable strategy because
| users want a web browser that _works_ on the sites they want to
| visit, and site owners aren 't going to rewrite their sites
| unless the browser has a big enough market share. But market
| share is going to be small for a browser that doesn't work.
| Rinse and repeat. It's a major chicken and egg problem.
| szastamasta wrote:
| Yes, we have done it to ourselves in the 90' when every
| browser had some custom extensions and small differences. And
| everyone was playing catch-up game. Then we got a bit of
| normality in 2000' when we standardised things. And now
| Google is playing like Microsoft - expanding web standards
| like crazy and nobody can catch up. I hope we stop this
| madness soon.
| jmisavage wrote:
| We had this with plugins and it was a security, performance,
| and compatibility nightmare.
|
| It wasn't that long ago you needed QuickTime and RealPlayer for
| videos. Then Flash, Director, Silverlight, and Java for
| multimedia.
| szastamasta wrote:
| We needed them because platform was too high level, not
| because we had not enough web APIs. If we could have a canvas
| and means to render efficiently, there would be no plugins
| necessary. And they were nightmare because you had to install
| them yourself on your client, not because they were not JS
| and DOM.
| saurik wrote:
| That isn't even slightly comparable as those plugins required
| the end user to install them, due to the inherent security
| concerns. Contrast that with today: you are constantly using
| websites which require giant libraries that entirely subvert
| the underlying semantics, such as React... it isn't at all
| crazy to just stop adding more BS to the browser and require
| more of it to end up in rendering layers such as React, or
| even to long for a web where React is merely built on top of
| something like canvas. (FWIW, Flutter is like this, and it is
| actually pretty damned good; it isn't _great_ , but if we
| concentrated on only adding features required to fix
| Flutter's complaints, the web would be better for it, and
| we'd see a ton of web browsers as a handful of people can
| legitimately build an operating system kernel or a language
| compiler or a virtual machine monitor or a CPU emulator or a
| 3D engine, and yet implementing all of the current web stack
| requires some giant company, which is ridiculous.)
| postalrat wrote:
| That all sounds great until you start considering what needs to
| be done for accessibility. For blind readers as well as many
| different screen resolutions.
| szastamasta wrote:
| I agree. That's actually one of few problems with having just
| canvas - accessibility. Most libraries would not have it, and
| it would be a disaster for disabled users, but... That's one
| of few things current state AI could solve. Why not make a
| neural net that would read or summarize page for blind
| people? Instead we use it to generate bulsh*t junk content
| and fake comments...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| It might, but I think that isn't the best way.
| Accessibility is for everyone, not only for the blind
| people.
|
| Better is if the document specifies the text (and any
| appropriate annotations, e.g. how to pronounce), and the
| blocks/sections/etc, and then the client software can
| display it according to the user's settings. Whether that
| means you want to display it on the screen, with your own
| formatting, or use a braille display, or text to speech, or
| whatever else it might be, you can use it.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree with some of this (WWW is too complicated and messy,
| and has other problems with its design), but I do not agree
| with everything, and anyways in many cases it cannot be
| corrected this easily.
|
| However, I should also think that documents should not need to
| execute JS or WebAssembly code; although there are uses for
| such things, it should perhaps be separately.
|
| Also, some of the semantic HTML commands can be helpful, such
| as <ARTICLE>, <TIME>, etc. (However, the user agent should
| decide how to display them, according to the options selected
| by the user; this should not be decided by the author of the
| document.)
|
| A completely new protocol and file format (or more than one) is
| another way. A few people have tried some things relating to
| this, including myself. One thing I had done is that, documents
| cannot contain scripts to be executed nor can they link to
| scripts to be executed as a part of the document; executable
| code can only be linked to from the conversion file (which does
| other things too, and is not only for executing programs; e.g.
| to specify how to transform a URL to download a file in a
| different format), and the user must explicitly tell it to
| execute; furthermore, it uses uxn and not JavaScript nor
| WebAssembly (since uxn is much simpler to implement); and, if
| the conversion file is implemented at all (for simplicity, it
| is not required), it is mandatory that the end user must be
| allowed to override it and specify their own conversion file
| instead (therefore, the end user decides what the client
| software does). Furthermore, I had also decided to use binary
| formats, to make them less complicated to parse special cases
| (to avoid needing so many escaping and stuff like that, which
| is necessary with HTML). And then, TLS is allowed but is
| optional; it does not have mandatory TLS (although it is
| recommended that servers and clients will accept both TLS and
| non-TLS connections; but a client or server that does not
| support TLS will still work even if the other does support TLS,
| if both TLS and non-TLS are implemented). There are many other
| things can be done too, to make improvement.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| >I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser
| development without millions of dollars. Web got so
| complicated.
|
| You can build something good enough for vast majority of
| websites and people.
| oissla wrote:
| Honestly, I still love Firefox and I'm a bit skeptical about
| rewriting everything from scratch when you have a fairly decent
| codebase. What's the point? Just burning money? You still need to
| implement the specs.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. So that means it
| must have raised $500k from other people, each of which cannot
| have given more than $30k. That's pretty impressive. I wonder who
| the other sponsors were.
| tamimio wrote:
| > No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of
| user monetization, ever.
|
| Sounds good, but how would you make sure the sponsors won't
| influence you in the future once it's popular enough? After all,
| they are still corporations and are after profits, as opposed to
| crowdfunding.
| mattstir wrote:
| I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I did notice that the
| Ladybird website mentions only accepting unrestricted
| donations. That doesn't prevent power dynamics from evolving
| between sponsors and the project, of course, but it at least
| means that no sponsors get to explicitly demand specific
| things.
| xmprt wrote:
| I think it's a valiant cause but even if that's what they
| claim right now, eventually they will have to weigh whether
| it's worth taking the $100k donation from sponsor A who
| doesn't demand working on feature X but just suggests it or
| risk the future runway of the project.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| Firefox user here... if you can do good on tree style tabs like
| the Sidebery add-on, let us know!
| ForHackernews wrote:
| This is wonderful news and I'm all for more diversity and user
| choice in the world of browsers, but this text...
|
| > preparing to become the only major web browser which does not
| treat the user like the product being sold.
|
| ...is either ignorant or a deliberate slam on Mozilla. Whatever
| else you might say about Firefox, it has never tried to "sell" me
| to anyone. The fact of the matter is that Mozilla has done the
| impossible for decades and gets no end of grief for it.
|
| (I expect we'll get a zillion complaints about search engine
| placement & Pocket recommendations because that always happens on
| this site)
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| This is awesome news!
|
| Ironically for a story about a webbrowser, the screen is showing
| 404 comments as I type this. :-)
| wslh wrote:
| > Their goal? To have a fully functional "Alpha" version of the
| Ladybird browser ready sometime in 2026.
|
| Mmmmmmh, I don't think this is a good goal. I would expect
| quicker iterations even with the web browser complexities.
| EricRiese wrote:
| What's stopping this from going the way of Edge?
|
| Why not fork Firefox or Chromium?
|
| Can you point to an example where Mozilla's funding model led it
| to make a bad decision?
| autoexec wrote:
| I love the idea of this project! I'm looking forward to giving it
| a try. I'm not your typical user (I'm more interested in what
| features a browser lets me disable than what it supports) and
| while right now Firefox comes out way ahead of everyone else in
| terms of empowering users to customize things to fit their needs
| it feels like with every update they introduce more features I
| need to disable and they're growing more aggressive about data
| collection.
|
| I hope that as Ladybird grows you'll keep privacy, security, and
| customization in mind because our options in that space are very
| limited.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from
| Google _who are an advertising company._
|
| A reminder that _years_ ago they were paid by an advertising
| firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show. When someone
| raised a bugzilla bug about it, the project manager for the
| plugin (who herself had come to Mozilla after a career in
| online advertising tech...) marked it employee-only. Another
| employee reversed that, and then someone at the highest levels
| of Mozilla leadership changed it to a level that made it
| unviewable even by employees.
|
| Pocket? That shit requires manually editing a bunch of config
| strings to disable. We were never asked "would you like to
| enable Pocket?" because they knew 99% of their audience would
| click "no." There _still_ isn 't a checkbox to disable it.
|
| This whole "privacy is our priority" thing has been a farce and
| always will be.
|
| But hey, they won't enable WebSerial because ZOMG DANGEROUS
| USERS CAN'T BE TRUSTED PRIVACY CHAOS DANGER DANGER MUST PROTECT
| THEM!
|
| ...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported
| for years, it asks the user to give permission per-site just
| like cameras and microphones. The world has not caught fire,
| nobody's pacemaker has killed them, etc.
| spencerflem wrote:
| C'man, those gaffes are so much less than the telemetry
| Chrome has, and so much more less than Chrome would have if
| there was no competition
|
| If your complaint is that Firefox doesn't support enough
| standards, ladybird is so far behind
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| Consider Librewolf instead of Firefox, at least to tide you
| over until Ladybird is available.
|
| > "A custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security
| and freedom. ... This is achieved through our privacy and
| security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to
| remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as
| well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM."
|
| It's built from Firefox as Mozilla puts out releases, and has
| feature parity with all the "anti-freedom" options being opt-in
| instead of opt-out. (Not exactly parity, none of the features
| like sync and "free VPN" that require a Mozilla account are
| available, but support for addons.mozilla.org makes it easy to
| fill those gaps.)
|
| The big caveat is that it can be a few days between a Firefox
| security update and a new Librewolf release. And no auto-
| updating (but you'd rather have a package manager like apt or
| homebrew take care of that anyway, wouldn't you?).
| metadat wrote:
| Could Ladybird become a symbolic phoenix for Mozilla before the
| org was hijacked? That would really be amazing, as there is now a
| void.
|
| It would give hope we're not doomed to Google's corporate
| strategy of cannibalization.
| bainganbharta wrote:
| Laughing at the amount of armchair lawyers in the comments.
| amatecha wrote:
| Just a quick FYI the founder of this browser has previously
| enacted a belief that using genderless language in code/comments
| is "advertising political politics"[0]. Not sure the founder's
| stance on this has changed but figured I'd mention.
|
| FWIW a generic Linux user account called "anon" is genderless by
| its very nature and rejecting the correction from "he" to "they"
| is far more political than simply correcting the error, (the
| correction of which I'd argue is not political whatsoever... and
| I can go a step further to argue that all software and technology
| is inherently "political", but that's a topic for another time).
|
| Fortunately a new PR[1] has been swiftly drafted and merged
| today.
|
| [0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
|
| [1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648
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