Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

How does ladybird compare to Servo?

https://servo.org/

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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?

Andreas, this is awesome :)!

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

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

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

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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?

What's the trouble with the Android port?

Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

So half a million lines of tech debt?

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++.

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

What is wrong with Mozilla?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Thank you for making the website! :)

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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 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.

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?

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.

May be I missed something obvious, what AI laptop?

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.

> 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.

Where's the Ladybird??

This is a textbook definition of bikeshedding though

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

How about you help build that if you want that?

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.

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

Why is that such a problem other than the human factor of seeing your code being used by some guys you don’t like?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Impeding content blockers like uBlock Origin.

What's wrong with looking at what might happen?

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?

Cause its not a european project.

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.

That's an interesting question...

Money of course.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Why is no one else asking this?

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 :)

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.

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”

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/ :)

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

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.

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.

You mean Shopify?

A brick in the ladder to open source heaven.

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".

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

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

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.