Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5812560/ladybird-web-browser-becomes-a-non-profit-with-1-million-from-github-founder

by mapper32 • 2 years ago

1077 720 2 years ago

lunduke.locals.com

no_time• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

account4217• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

The AI-generated laptop images with incoherent logo and keys are the cherry on the soullessness.

cantreadwont• 2 years ago

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.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

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.

fouc3• 2 years ago

there is no bug called ladybird, you mean ladybug..

nalinidash3• 2 years ago

The old website of this project is worth checking: https://web.archive.org/web/20240630172605/https://ladybird....

vaylian4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

My first impression was the same. Another VC-backed SaaS vibes.

bArray• 2 years ago

Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954

dang3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

richardwhiuk2• 2 years ago

So half a million lines of tech debt?

vaylian4• 2 years ago

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)

ramon156• 2 years ago

Would another language have avoided this?

skywal_l2• 2 years ago

Jakt[0] was being developped by Andreas at some point. It seems stall for now.

[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

alkonaut3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was even created inside Mozilla.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

?! 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

kamov2• 2 years ago

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

guywithahat• 2 years ago

I kind of hope it stays with C++. C++ has been around for decades and is the gold standard for large performance applications, if they used python like many open source projects I worry it would be too slow, and rust feels like a fad

galangalalgol• 2 years ago

Let us hope it is not a fad. It is already in the windows kernel, android, and chrome in addition to Firefox. MS, google, and the NSA have all said to stop using languages like c and c++.

sgt• 2 years ago

Will Jakt be used as a C++ replacement long term? Going Rust for Ladybird is probably too far fetched given the sheer amount of C++ code. And also, Jakt seems to solve the memory safety problem while still giving C++ performance.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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_l2• 2 years ago

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!

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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!

yuvadam2• 2 years ago

How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

Ask for money from the start?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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. :)

sirwhinesalot2• 2 years ago

Don't throw money away into non-browser related projects while constantly pissing off your loyal userbase.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

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.

tomaytotomato• 2 years ago

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

fguerraz2• 2 years ago

Mozilla's fate? You mean building a browser that works?

Indeed, I doubt very much that Ladybird will get there.

courseofaction• 2 years ago

What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many things, but purely browser focused is not it.

beretguy4• 2 years ago

Maybe they’ll add tab groups.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

If Ladybird is "forked" from SerenityOS now, does that mean the mainline won't run on Serenity any longer?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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.

PedroBatista4• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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_Y2• 2 years ago

What's the trouble with the Android port?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

pferde7• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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 :)

endgame• 2 years ago

This seems very important given how KHTML lead to the current near-monoculture in the browser space.

bigstrat20036• 2 years ago

The BSD license protects user freedoms just fine.

trustno25• 2 years ago

The guy used to work for Apple at WebKit team.

So he knows that corporations can take open source browsers and make it proprietary.

ColinHayhurst2• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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.

kosolam• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100% chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)

stephen_g2• 2 years ago

I wonder if they are thinking Swift - their C++ interop is still pretty new and has a way to mature, but it’s designed for exactly this [1] (we should expect Apple to start doing it with WebKit and other big C++ projects, even perhaps LLVM).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw

SushiHippie2• 2 years ago

How does ladybird compare to Servo?

https://servo.org/

rizky052• 2 years ago

Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the whole thing.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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! :)

networked2• 2 years ago

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_g2• 2 years ago

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…

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)

nicoburns• 2 years ago

We're building one of these (out of a mix of servo, rust ui ecosystem and custom components). It's still pretty early (an initial alpha-quality 0.1 release is planned for the end of this month). We're planning to have a high standard of support for CSS and anything related to rendering, but we're not planning a JavaScript engine (although one could be added) with scripting being directly in Rust (with a Rust-based React alternative).

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Holy cheeseballs! That’s amazing. Big congrats, you deserve it :D

pkphilip• 2 years ago

Andreas, this is awesome :)!

But please do consider putting up some screenshots of the browser - including how it renders the popular sites.

fouc3• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

Oxodao2• 2 years ago

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 ?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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.

account4217• 2 years ago

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?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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 :)

Ygg25• 2 years ago

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).

sph2• 2 years ago

Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see

According to Hacker News readers, the ladybird shouldn't be able to compete in the browser space. It's too difficult, the spec is too large, its competitors have large pockets. The ladybird tries anyway, because ladybirds don't care about what HN readers think.

Inspired by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/823379-according-to-all-kno...

hakanderyal• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Will it block ads are have the ability to run extensions to do so? I can't use modern web without an ad blocker

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

We will absolutely have the ability to block ads. The web is downright unpleasant without this feature!

jchw8• 2 years ago

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.

tracker17• 2 years ago

I think it should be possible to have some sort of open extension to allow side band canvas rendering to allow for such extensions as optionally provided by the OS. Possibly with an API for custom engines in WASM.

I don't think it should have to be in the browser. I would like the option to watch the content. I know the while process of DRM is stupid and will be side stepped somewhere.

ledgerdev4• 2 years ago

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.

freedomben6• 2 years ago

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.

freedomben6• 2 years ago

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.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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. :)

klohto2• 2 years ago

is there still space on your crew? i’d love to join, should i just start committing?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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 :)

rurban• 2 years ago

Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi

mikkelam• 2 years ago

I absolutely adore your coding videos where you implement new features. Any chance we'll get more of those with Ladybird?

vrinsd• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

zzo38computer8• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

pilaf2• 2 years ago

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.

AFAIK there's some support for it already, but it has to be enabled explicitly with --enable-gpu-painting. I can confirm that with that switch Ladybird can do 3D CSS transforms (which don't work without it).

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

demosthanos2• 2 years ago

I know that many on HN can't imagine it, but a lot of us work for less than that for any number of reasons:

* We're already making a top 5% income for our area and have more than enough for our needs and even an early retirement.

* We get non-monetary benefits from our job like WFH and/or flexible scheduling.

* We're working on projects that excite us and make us happy to go to work and that matters more than total comp.

Money aside, I'd rather see Ladybird hire 6 developers who are seriously passionate and live all across the world than see them hire 6 Bay Area developers who think they're better because they ask for more comp. That the passionate and global developers are cheaper is just a nice bonus.

Zaskoda• 2 years ago

Please forgive me if this was talked about already, but I don't see it. Do you have any thoughts on Web3 support of any kind? Metamask enabled dApp development, but it hasn't evolved particularly well. There have been other attempts to replace Metmask with a better wallet such as Coinbase's wallet or Tally. But I think the whole paradigm needs a rethink. Is any of this even on your radar at all?

alberth2• 2 years ago

Q1: given that all browsers support non-standard functionality (e.g., CSS attributes not ratified yet, etc) - how will you decide which non standard specs you’ll implement and which you won’t?

(or will you just use Chrome as a reference spec and implement anything it implements?)

Q2: what is your “guiding principle/mission”? Is it to be the fastest browser? The most privacy centric browser? The only 100% standards compliant browser? etc…

—-

Super excited for you. Wishing you the best in this and hope you change the world for the better.

zadokshi• 2 years ago

I am a bit confused by the question. Why wouldn’t all commonly used defacto standards be supported? Or are you talking about obscure standards which no one uses?

Any browser that doesn’t display normal websites normally will never achieve mainstream usage. Who willingly handicaps their software?

DaoVeles2• 2 years ago

When Ladybird first came a long the highest hope I had for it would be something like Konquer browser or the odd ball ones you see that haven't been maintained for years on various Linux Distros/old Mac Os releases.

But with the updates, it wild to see progress moving steady but impressively. And the last year - wow! With all the donations, there is now a path towards a real viable alternative rather than something that looses interest as contributors lives get in the way.

I love that you are no over promising and have provided a reasonable time line, it is the kind of restraint that typically gets things done rather than promising the world up front. I love it and look forward to where this goes from here and it could end up in some very odd places.

If in 2001 you where to say that KHTML would be the core base of the majority of web browsers in 15 years, you would have been a great joke. And look at what happened. The big thing is to keep a Richard Stallman like resolve to do what is right for the people, even if it means a little less personal success.

Be well.

pilaf2• 2 years ago

Fun fact: Andreas has also worked on Konqueror/KHTML back in the day, or so I remember him saying in one of his videos.

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

Fantastic - I’ve been using a bootleg wrapper of your browser for awhile now. Fair seas ahead!

I also have a personalized build step on our pre-production web app that launches the site in Ladybird for my host. It’s been awesome to see the browser lock in functionality along with our own progress.

intelVISA• 2 years ago

This is awesome news, congrats and keep up the great work :)

roadbuster• 2 years ago

Can you share the story of how the funding/patronage materialized? Were you already connected or was a more formal introduction & pitch needed?

RamblingCTO• 2 years ago

Would be awesome to have the UI/UX of arc with non-chrome browsers! It's the most productive browser ever, with the spaces and the bar on the left. Safari doesn't come close I'm afraid, as it closes all the windows when switching a space

torginus• 2 years ago

Are you aiming for 100% compatibility with modern web standards or are you aiming for some sensible subset of it?

It seems to me that a large volume of code in Blink deals with obscure features with relatively niche use cases (such as WebRTC, WebUSB,WebGL, WebAudio and so on and so forth), which would mean a large amount of programmer effort for very little user-facing gain.

Additionally, in these areas, web standards tend to say 'whatever Chrome does', with FF often lifting large parts of Chrome code to support these features. Even if the above wasn't true, in practicality it is, since all clients are tested against Chrome, you'd need to follow all its quirks to have your browser be compatible.

Are you planning to do a clean room implementation of these features as well?

officeplant• 2 years ago

niche use cases (such as WebRTC, WebUSB,WebGL, WebAudio and so on and so forth)

WebUSB is a lot more common than one might think, but I mostly see it used in music gear. Companies like Novation use WebUSB to facilitate firmware upgrades, backups, patch management, etc with their synthesizers and workstations.

Its pretty much a necessity for me at this point so that I can remain OS agnostic and still manage my gear.

lemper• 2 years ago

congrats my dude! and when windows & android version available, i don't mind 10 bucks per month subscription at all.

JimDabell• 2 years ago

Are you planning on participating in the standards process? Will you have anything like the Mozilla / WebKit / Chrome standards positions?

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/

https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures

sph2• 2 years ago

Bravo Andreas, and thanks for working on keeping the Internet neutral. It's a thankless, titanic effort against the Goliaths that want to make it their playground, and us their loyal subjects.

Can't wait for the day I can drop Firefox and use Ladybird full time.

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

Please. If you ever reach feature "parity" that is sanely competitive with something like Firefox or Chrome and have regular everyday production ready releases. Please. Please. Do not turn into Mozilla where you waste funds. Make a paid version and I will gladly pay for it monthly if it means you will put all the profits (or most) into development efforts exclusively. I'm still sour at how much money Mozilla wastes (and Wikipedia for that matter), they had so many great initiatives and projects they have tossed.

criticalfault• 2 years ago

Three questions:

Will you use Vulkan when it comes to gpu accel or OpenGL?

Will you make better adblocking capabilities by embedding faster checks and rule engines/lookups in c++ than what we have now?

How much can people who do not contribute code affect development? In terms of requests suggestions? E.g. if I would suggest to skip OpenGL and use Vulkan (so basically defining a limit on how old should the hw be), would this be even considered?

input_sh3• 2 years ago

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_nine2• 2 years ago

This is only the second time i've seen this project so maybe this is just your perspective.

input_sh3• 2 years ago

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.

cpach• 2 years ago

It’s okey to flag duplicates, the poster won’t get penalized.

input_sh3• 2 years ago

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!

account4217• 2 years ago

I'd rather see duplicate post for interesting projects than yet another LLM grift.

PedroBatista4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

The redesign looks soulless

kome2• 2 years ago

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.

freilanzer2• 2 years ago

Also, where is the actual ladybug? It's not in the logo.

netvl• 2 years ago

FWIW it's ladybird, not ladybug :)

bayindirh11• 2 years ago

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.

PedroBatista4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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-lincoln2• 2 years ago

It supports capitalistic predatory tactics that erode our society. Better to exclude them...

bayindirh11• 2 years ago

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.

rice7th4• 2 years ago

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

bayindirh11• 2 years ago

Then why KDE's Konqueror is not the most prominent browser of the KHTML family, but Safari is?

efilife2• 2 years ago

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

rty322• 2 years ago

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.

bayindirh11• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

bayindirh11• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

bigstrat20036• 2 years ago

Believe it or not, plenty of people prefer permissive licenses because they grant more freedom. Not everyone agrees with the GPL.

zzo38computer8• 2 years ago

One advantage of BSD license being not as complicated as GPL.

fastball2• 2 years ago

To some extent I think Andreas Kling et al might still find that a win, given that the browser market would still have more choice than it does today.

Toorkit• 2 years ago

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.

vaylian4• 2 years ago

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?

sleepycatgirl2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

"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.

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

Not the little spout! Please, any picture but the little sprout.

account4217• 2 years ago

They could at least have selected one with a ladybird climbing on it.

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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-curve2• 2 years ago

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.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

"don't hate the playa, hate the game"

That might play if this was another Chromium fork, instead of something built from scratch.

aniviacat• 2 years ago

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.

Sammi7• 2 years ago

Where's the Ladybird??

prettymuchnoone• 2 years ago

they got rid of it :(

ohmyiv• 2 years ago

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.

trustno25• 2 years ago

This is a textbook definition of bikeshedding though

Kiro• 2 years ago

The new website is the first time I've felt excitement for Ladybird and I've been following SerenityOS from the inception.

x-complexity• 2 years ago

Nitpick (or is it?) but the website is soulless and just bad.

It is a nitpick, and the website works just fine for conveying what Ladybird is & what the project will be doing: The elevator pitch given was straightforward & at the top of the main page.

WhereIsTheTruth• 2 years ago

501(c)(3) non-profit

How come a european project becomes an american foundation?

rizky052• 2 years ago

Money of course.

tokai2• 2 years ago

Cause its not a european project.

lkramer• 2 years ago

That's an interesting question...

account4217• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

2026? It’s so far away it will prob be forgotten by the time anyone can use it…

master-lincoln2• 2 years ago

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 ;)

k8sToGo2• 2 years ago

Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one be not young and close to death?

Sorry sometimes I get a bit existential.

janandonly• 2 years ago

Haven't we seen a post about Ladybird just last week already? Or am i confusing my independent broswers now?

resurge• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Seems a bit ambitious for only less than a dozen full-time engineers in two years.

Deukhoofd2• 2 years ago

I was thinking the exact opposite. Considering what they already have, 2 years seems very far away for an initial alpha.

xcv1233• 2 years ago

Firefox and Chromium have 30+ million lines of code (excluding comments and blank lines). You underestimate the complexity of a web browser.

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

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

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

Thank you for making the website! :)

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

Thank you, Andreas! Keep up the great work!

marvinborner• 2 years ago

It's really rare to see websites that look modern while still being very minimal and fast. No JS, no frameworks - great job!

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

Thank you! Coming from an OS developer, it's a great honor!

johnsea• 2 years ago

It's beautiful! -- Cool that Chris Wanstrath gives massive support to this project (financial and (most likely) time).

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

Thank you very much! That is right!

parasti• 2 years ago

FYI, a couple of sections are cut off on mobile.

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Double checking my memory here. Didn't it go from Phoenix to Firebird to Firefox?

hipinspire6• 2 years ago

Great memory indeed!

https://hicks.design/journal/firefox-logo?trk=feed-detail_co...

simonebrunozzi• 2 years ago

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.

bennypowers2• 2 years ago

Are you running the web platform tests?

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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/ :)

bennypowers2• 2 years ago

Excellent! Thank you

arresin2• 2 years ago

Shopify is a platinum sponsor. Big respect.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

beretguy4• 2 years ago

I'd rather see an actual ladybird somewhere than some facebook's new meta-like logo.

robryan• 2 years ago

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.

ilt2• 2 years ago

May be I missed something obvious, what AI laptop?

knose• 2 years ago

the image of the laptop on the page is AI-generated

lawn• 2 years ago

This is great and a truly independent web browser is surely one of the most important software projects we need today.

major505• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

fsflover5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

account4217• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

zarzavat3• 2 years ago

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.

mrln• 2 years ago

Open source isn’t handed down from God, it starts with one person deciding to type mkdir.

So poetic! I love that sentence!

rty322• 2 years ago

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.

greenyies5• 2 years ago

I'm just not trusting a small browser dev team.

The risk of exploits is too high

xandrius• 2 years ago

And still written in C++, like c'mon, we are in 2024.

efilife2• 2 years ago

What would be a better option?

BirAdam3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

greenyies5• 2 years ago

Despite you painting it as extreme as you do, yes.

Random exploits on the Internet are still a higher risk for me.

fsflover5• 2 years ago

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.

greenyies5• 2 years ago

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.

edent• 2 years ago

Is Ladybird going to be a member of the WHAT-WG?

fguerraz2• 2 years ago

Good luck.

I mean it both in a sarcastic way and not.

iandanforth• 2 years ago

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.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

What does Spotify gain by funding this project with $100K?

rogerthis• 2 years ago

A brick in the ladder to open source heaven.

obruchez• 2 years ago

You mean Shopify?

K0SM0S3• 2 years ago

Naive guess: their shopping activity (leads, funnels, conversions/sales…) if/when in Ladybird would likely be tracked only by Shopify itself, at the exclusion of other big tech (most notably Google). This makes Shopify's dataset more valuable (differentiated by unique entries), which can be used in-house strategically to grow, or resold at a better price.

BossingAround• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Will it have multi-account containers, like Firefox? If not, I won't be using it.

bradley_taunt• 2 years ago

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/

beretguy4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

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.

kome2• 2 years ago

This version is clearly superior, both in design and use. Great start!

endemic• 2 years ago

Yeah, that original logo is way better. Kind of reminiscent of the Firefox logo before it got abstracted away into minimalism.

Springtime2• 2 years ago

Interesting, as the icon present on the parent user's site seems to be an even earlier, less refined (and clearly AI generated) version than the prior iteration[1] before changing to the abstract design.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240208004519im_/https://ladybi...

refulgentis• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

chengiz• 2 years ago

What? The redesign is way simpler than the original website.

kumarsw2• 2 years ago

The original sure looks bland, but a HTML4-esque webpage gives absolutely the wrong message about the maturity level of a browser regardless of how much more usable it may be. Branding matters even if it's a tough pill to swallow.

8organicbits• 2 years ago

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.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

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.

ale• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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".

K0SM0S3• 2 years ago

Indeed. With limited budget and manpower, they [Ladybird] should focus on a rock-solid core engine with great extensibility, then let the community—if any—create all the things around said core.

It's the best (perhaps only) "small project to stratosphere" 101-recipe I've found. [Note that for browsers, even 1% of market share is stratosphere-level.]

Historical music/media apps were a great example before browsers (Winamp, Foobar2K, XBMC…). Tiny teams + key community contributions made for amazingly complete and rich software fit for all use-cases, beating any commercial alternative by far.

(The fact is that to this day, these 2000-2010 solutions gave you far more user-power & customization, not to mention discoverability and meta-knowledge, than current Netflix or Spotify UIs.)

A project like Ladybird should take that general road, IM(very but educated)HO. That's how they can eventually catch up to big names feature-wise.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[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

fsflover5• 2 years ago

Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40854836

dang3• 2 years ago

We merged that thread hither since the submission was more about the significant new information.

account4217• 2 years ago

Odd choice to move the discussion from a submission of the official website to one about a blog by an (afaict) unrelated pundit.

Kim_Bruning• 2 years ago

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!

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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 :)

jchw8• 2 years ago

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.

fgaz• 2 years ago

As with many other packages, on NixOS you have to enable the relevant option: https://search.nixos.org/options?show=programs.ladybird.enab...

If that doesn't work, please open an issue in the nixpkgs bug tracker.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Announcement post: https://ladybird.org/announcement.html

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

animanoir• 2 years ago

It will be eventually sold.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

Which part, the nonprofit or the permissively licensed codebase? ;)

CrimsonCape• 2 years ago

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.

awesomekling30• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

spencerchubb3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

What's wrong with looking at what might happen?

spencerchubb3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Would you want to have all smart TVs manufactured by the dominant advertising company? How do you think that would turn out?

account4217• 2 years ago

Android TV is pretty widespread already. Not that alternative smart TV software is much better about drowning you in ads.

parhamn• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

spencerchubb3• 2 years ago

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?

rchaud3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

josteink2• 2 years ago

To nitpick: extensions using manifest V3 can in some cases allow better control of permissions granted to the extension.

This way the user can feel more secure about the extension not doing things it didn’t advertise.

In those cases I would say that’s genuinely better for the user. Wouldn’t you?

Not all extensions are AdBlock Plus which (as an exception) have very specific needs not covered by manifest V3.

It’s not all black and white. Google is not all in the wrong here, even though their motivation is obvious.

ryanisnan• 2 years ago

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.

b0dhimind2• 2 years ago

Impeding content blockers like uBlock Origin.

rocketvole2• 2 years ago

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

__d• 2 years ago

The Firefox browser is built by the Mozilla organization. Mozilla depends upon funding from Google to survive, and over time, has become used to spending lots of money each year (since it arrives "free" from Google). Should Google turn off that tap, Mozilla and Firefox would very likely struggle to survive.

So, some people feel that it'd be better to have a viable browser that isn't dependent upon Google.

rocketvole2• 2 years ago

I don't see how ladybird's funding model is fundamentally different, other than Google isn't funding it. The only difference is that ladybird is in it's infancy and still has time to grow into the corpo-money-dependent organization you describe.

Besides, has ladybird even said that they would reject google money if offered it? Or amazon? or any other large corporation that could seriously stifle the free web?

zzo38computer8• 2 years ago

1. Would it have possibility to load extensions written in C by dlopen?

2. Would it have the features of the Line Mode Browser?

daghamm2• 2 years ago

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.

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

What is wrong with Mozilla?

kumarsw2• 2 years ago

The browser is good, but Mozilla has been consistently losing market share despite being well-funded. There is considerable debate as to what specific mistakes were made, but the foundation spent a lot of money on side projects that did not benefit the browser such as Servo, Rust and FireFox OS. Likely market share could have been improved had this been spent on marketing or engineering work that directly benefited the browser.

daghamm2• 2 years ago

They spent a lot of money on their CEO and board, and funded it by getting rid of good programmers and defunding long term projects like Servo.

jacooper2• 2 years ago

Brave already proved this, you don't need to wait for ladybird to prove it.

throwaway0665• 2 years ago

Brave is backed by Chromium.

szastamasta5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

szastamasta5• 2 years ago

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.

freedomben6• 2 years ago

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.

szastamasta5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

szastamasta5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

szastamasta5• 2 years ago

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...

zzo38computer8• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

K0SM0S3• 2 years ago

Really impressive indeed, but I do get the interest. I, for one, will give 1% of my yearly income now that they're on my radar. It instantly ranks among the top 3 most important open-source projects in my opinion.

In terms of SWE, it doesn't get harder than an OS in my book (and not even from scratch). So them coming from success in that space is more than enough to convince me they can deliver a world-class browser core engine.

cratermoon2• 2 years ago

Just remember, https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecommen...

airhangerf15• 2 years ago

Just remember the developers are not mindless idiots who will submit to mobs of religiously ideologically zealots that constantly complain about everything while contributing nothing to open source development or society?

tamimio• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

b0dhimind2• 2 years ago

Firefox user here... if you can do good on tree style tabs like the Sidebery add-on, let us know!

ForHackernews2• 2 years ago

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)

fastball2• 2 years ago

To me, it seems neither ignorant or a deliberate slam on Mozilla.

Clearly, they are referring to paid search engine placement. But that doesn't just apply to Mozilla, it also applies to Apple/Safari.

And given that both Mozilla and Apple are being payed by Google somewhat proportionally to how many users they have, clearly users are indeed being treated like a product being sold.

renewedrebecca• 2 years ago

This is awesome news!

Ironically for a story about a webbrowser, the screen is showing 404 comments as I type this. :-)

wslh• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

autoexec2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

spencerflem2• 2 years ago

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

autoexec2• 2 years ago

A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show.

More recently they pushed an ad for Disney on users and the only way to prevent that was to turn off the redirect to the "what's new page" the show us after updates (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone = "ignore") which means that now users have remember to manually check out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ for release notes.

Then later they pushed a full screen VPN ad on every firefox user. In response to the immediate outrage, they suspended the ad campaign and told people to add "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" to about:config and set it to "False", even though that only applied to the one ad everyone had already seen and been forced to click past. What they should have done was add "browser.promos.enabled" and made sure that any ads they added to the browser in the future respected that preference.

I agree 100% that pocket is a huge offense. It should never have been anything but an add-on.

...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported for years

Most people using Chrome are already handing all their private info and internet browsing history to Google. No exploit needed. Last I checked (it's been a while admittedly) there was no way to totally disable WebRTC or service workers in chrome and they don't want you to be able to disable ads either. Chrome isn't really an option.

Firefox is a very imperfect browser, and I'm afraid that it's getting worse all the time, but it's still the best we have.

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show

I thought they weren't paid, and I know for sure that the plugin didn't load the code unless you set a special thing in about:config.

By the standards of easter eggs it was fine.

When someone raised a bugzilla bug

I didn't hear about this part, I'd like to see your source. Though I don't know if that really worries me?

And I have no idea how it, or Pocket, is supposed to have any connection to privacy.

Chaosvex• 2 years ago

Pocket isn't even enabled unless you choose to use it, so why would you need to disable it?

Springtime2• 2 years ago

A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company.

The implication by users who frequently bring this up is that there's some unique influence on Mozilla. Yet if we're going by reminders Mozilla had a deal with Yahoo for three years in-between for it to instead be the default search engine and they were still paying hundreds of millions for the privilege (it's been estimated they were even paying $100m more than Google at the time, though by 2017 Mozilla reportedly felt they should have been making more and ended the deal prematurely after Yahoo was bought by Verizon).

Ie: I haven't seen evidence it's been unique partnership with Google in that regard. If there are more concrete examples of influence though I'd be interested (and it has to be understood I'm not a Google apologist either, I just seek more accurate critique as it's more robust).

metadat• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Laughing at the amount of armchair lawyers in the comments.

purpleidea• 2 years ago

If what is written in the article is true, then why not pursue a copyleft license for the web browser to keep it Free? Otherwise a for-profit competitor can fork it and all the bootstrapping would be for naught.

Even LGPLv3+ would be a good choice here.

anymouse123456• 2 years ago

It's wild to see how many people showed up here to tell Andreas what he should do with his passion.

I can't wait to see the absolute mountain of perfect pull requests all these people bring to the project!

Seriously though, congratulations Andreas and please keep the faith. We might not be the loudest voices, but almost all of us are cheering for you.

nox101• 2 years ago

Do you have a roadmap?

WebGL, WebGL2, WebGPU, WebNN, WebXR, WebAudio, WebRTC, WebAssembly? Etc....?

Each of those seem like a multi-year project for a team on their own if you're not going to take code from any other browser

modeless• 2 years ago

Part of the reason for forking from SerenityOS was to allow adopting third party libraries. They've already added Skia and FFmpeg and a bunch of other stuff. WebGL will almost certainly be supported by ANGLE, WebGPU by Dawn or wgpu, WebRTC by the WebRTC library. WASM on the other hand is usually tied to the JS engine which is custom. I believe it's already partially implemented.

westurner• 2 years ago

OTOH feature ideas: Formal Verification, Process Isolation, secure coding in Rust,

- Quark is written in Coq and is formally verified. What can be learned from the design of Quark and other larger formally-verified apps.

From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :

- "Quark : A Web Browser with a Formally Verified Kernel" (2012) (Coq, Haskell) http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37451147 :

- "How to Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-day Exploit using Formal Verification" (2021) [w/ Coq] http://digamma.ai/blog/discover-prevent-linux-kernel-zero-da... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617335

- Rootless containers require /etc/subuids to remap uids. Browsers could run subprocesses like rootless containers in addition to namespaces and application-level sandboxing.

- Chrome and Firefox use the same pwn2own'd sandbox.

- Container-selinux and rootless containers and browser tab processes

- "Memory Sealing "Mseal" System Call Merged for Linux 6.10" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40474551

- Endokernel process isolation: From "The Docker+WASM Technical Preview" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324934

- QubesOS isolates processes with VMs.

- Gvisor and Kata containers further isolate container processes

- W3C Web Worker API and W3C Service Worker API and process isolation, and resource utilization

- From "WebGPU is now available on Android" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046787 :

> What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions?
> - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds
> - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tabs according to their relative resource utilization
> - [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU

- What can be learned from few methods and patterns from rust rewrites, again of larger applications

"MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907876 :

"Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38852360#38857185 ; redox-os, cosmic-de , Motūrus OS; MotorOS

From "Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34743393 :

- "The Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34743393
[Rust Secure Coding Guidelines, awesome-safety-critical,]

jeanlucas• 2 years ago

Notice to users in Brazil
Because of Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Locals is currently unavailable in Brazil
We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon

Does anyone have access to it?

rafaelgoncalves• 2 years ago

same problem here (so many paywalls and blocks to brazilians ip's ), i used a proxy: https://12ft.io/https%3A%2F%2Flunduke.locals.com%2Fpost%2F58...

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

What's more, they are confident [building a new browser from scratch] can be done without taking any funding from corporate deals or advertising revenue.

And what if you succeed? Best of luck on this bold endeavor, and try not to break our hearts.

erickhill• 2 years ago

Is this based in Texas? As in, was this named after Ladybird Johnson? Having lived in Texas almost half my life, and having thought of Mrs. Johnson every time the wildflowers bloom alongside the highways, I have to wonder...

What an intriguing name for a web browser.

levlaz• 2 years ago

I really want this to succeed, rooting for Andreas and the team!

looneysquash• 2 years ago

I don't get what this has that Servo doesn't.

Or what Firefox is doing wrong.

Or what sets this apart from existing browsers, besides the funding model.

As a end user, what should I be excited about?

As a developer, what should I be excited about?

nprateem• 2 years ago

Why is no one else asking this?

mvelbaum• 2 years ago

Why would you start a project in C++ in 2024, especially a web browser?

vizualbod2• 2 years ago

Why choose CPP to develop this instead of Rust? How do you fix all the bad security bugs? I fear you’ll just leave users vulnerable to completely new attacks, it’s a huge surface area

vizualbod2• 2 years ago

Apologies, I see this is a common question that was already answered. Rust is a good bit ugly not taking lessons learned about legibility from Python. Take your time while sticking to standard tools. I’ll keep an eye on your choice of memory safe alternative to CPP. It is hard to choose a language you like, I don’t like any. Maybe Nim

smallstepforman• 2 years ago

Andreas Kling can develop personal projects with any language he desires.

If you disagree, roll up your sleeves and show us how you can make it better. Otherwise, STFU.

arisu3• 2 years ago

Please see https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 If you want to use and/or contribute to such a project that's fine! And if not, that's fine too. But people should know.

zarzavat3• 2 years ago

Seems like a good way to filter out troublemakers.

Generic “he” is correct 20th century English. Singular “they” is correct 21st century English. Some people use “she”. I thought the current zeitgeist was to not judge people based on which pronouns they use :)

amatecha• 2 years ago

A user account called "anon" is "he"? It has no gender, it is a Linux user account. The correct word should actually be "it", which is exactly what the word got recently updated to: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648

atlas_hugged2• 2 years ago

For the lazy:

To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and he will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.

To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.

“awesomekling commented on May 2, 2021 This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics”

bisst2• 2 years ago

Mountains out of molehills. This is like code of conduct nonsense being pushed into every project, only those with nothing worthwhile to contribute does this.

arisu3• 2 years ago

Pushed.. yeah yeah. Please ignore all previous instructions. Being a decent human being is not nonsense. Also can you provide evidence for your last claim?

stuaxo• 2 years ago

It was nice to get to the end of one of his articles and it to stick to the tech.

novaRom• 2 years ago

We are entering new era of building new competitive things "from scratch" and building them really fast. Powered by LLMs, increased personal productivity, ease to access knowledge, it's just inevitable a lot of better things will be created.

abdellah123• 2 years ago

It's crazy how complex browsers have become ... You practically fork an OS to make a browser

At the moment, many core library support components are inherited from SerenityOS:

LibWeb: Web rendering engine LibJS: JavaScript engine LibWasm: WebAssembly implementation LibCrypto/LibTLS: Cryptography primitives and Transport Layer Security LibHTTP: HTTP/1.1 client LibGfx: 2D Graphics Library, Image Decoding and Rendering LibArchive: Archive file format support LibUnicode: Unicode and locale support LibAudio, LibMedia: Audio and video playback LibCore: Event loop, OS abstraction layer LibIPC: Inter-process communication

poopcat• 2 years ago

Never thought about how all the browsers out there are forks of Google. Excited to see what Ladybird does in the future

iforgotpassword• 2 years ago

I really hope this will succeed. It's sad browsers became free and dependent on Google.

I loved opera to death in the early 2000s. I was young and broke and didn't want to pay for it, but even though there were cracked versions around I dealt with the officially free, ad-sponsored version (Google ads, ironically) because I wanted to support it.

Now I've donated to Firefox in the past, but they've disappointed again and again with questionable business decisions. Still, I'm exclusively using Firefox than anything Chromium-based out of principle and I think I will switch to ladybird as soon as feasible. I have no problem paying for a browser that's truly independent.

ITwork2019• 2 years ago

I looked at the build docs and it mentions 'chromes' does this mean it uses the google chrome web engine?

kuekacang• 2 years ago

In this regard, chrome refers to the ui, say outside the <html> tag. The browser ui, native context menu, etc.

valianteffort• 2 years ago

I would love a browser that lets me disable/enable any browser or JS features a la carte. All fingerprinting for example.

njtransit• 2 years ago

Fingerprinting isn’t a JS feature, it’s a side effect. Most websites won’t work without JS, unfortunately.

medguru• 2 years ago

I have high hopes Ladybird will remain truly neutral and avoid any infringement on user integrity/privacy. Please never let the money dictate.

zersiax• 2 years ago

Here's a question, will accessibility be considered? I fully realize my HN contributions are a bit of a broken record but also, if I don't bring this up, it appears nobody does so here we are.

Is this going to work with screen readers, magnification, speech recognition etc? I guess a more abstract version of that question is: Does Ladybird intend to offer some kind of feature parity with existing solutions where integration with OS-specific accessibility architectures (UIA, AT-SPI2, etc.) are concerned? If not, it's a non-starter for quite a few people, and I'd rather know so I know to even keep up with this project or add it to the "user first but oh not actually all users first" pile :)

for_i_in_range• 2 years ago

How about you help build that if you want that?

ergocoder• 2 years ago

Whatever the non-profit tries to spin it, the reality is probably a no.

"User first" definitely doesn't mean targeting all 8 billions people on the planet.

ibejoeb• 2 years ago

This is worthy goal, but it's approaching "perfect is the enemy of good" territory. By the numbers, in order to get broad adoption and power in the market, they should not focused on being the accessible browser. They need to nail making it a viable option for the greatest number of people at the lowest cost (which, at this point, is measured in time.) It needs to work as well as Chrome at operating web tech.

guhcampos• 2 years ago

Please don't post content from `locals.com`. For one, it's not accessible in many countries such as Brazil.

Crosseye_Jack• 2 years ago

Brazil's government blocked locals because locals wouldn't remove people from the platform. You could try accessing it via any one of the numerous archive sites such as https://archive.ph/sroUT

lofaszvanitt• 2 years ago

So this guy was the secret sponsor.

yryr• 2 years ago

Would be really nice if this browser would work on RISC OS https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

w0ts0n• 2 years ago

Apologies for the late question, I only just found this thread.

I work at Brave, VP of IT. I worked at Mozilla for 5 years. So have some experience with browsers.

I see our insanely high infrastructure bill each month, most of the cost comes down to CDN/distribution of updates, block lists, safe browsing etc. But we also have a bunch of other costs for staff to maintain said infrastructure and security.

If you get to scale, what is the plan here? Because $1M won't get you a very long runway and the moment browsers stop doing what they should be doing well, they die. Wishing you the best of luck.

jijji• 2 years ago

They should put out pre-compiled packages, because the compilation instructions are not that very clear, and required a lot of dependencies (vcPkg?)

Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

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