8 ms·

Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to. The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and th

by 1GZ0 2y ago

Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to. The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors. It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point. While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.

The_Colonel 2y ago
I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS. But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment. The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great. Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.
- 1GZ0 2y ago
  Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really. I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.
- hurutparittya 2y ago
  I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".
  - nacs 2y ago
    As a Firefox user, this exactly. The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on. I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
    - worble 2y ago
      I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.
      - Propelloni 2y ago
        Yes, or Waterfox [1]. [1] https://www.waterfox.net/ https://www.waterfox.net/
      - nacs 2y ago
        Thanks. Finally got around to installing Librewolf and it works great. Sensible defaults as Firefox should be.
      - EasyMark 2y ago
        I will definitely second this. I moved over to librewolf last year and love it. I’m glad Mozilla is staying in business though. I know not every organization has my beliefs and I can live with that
    - HeckFeck 2y ago
      > I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF.. I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.
      - metasaval 2y ago
- bambax 2y ago
  On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?
  - spookie 2y ago
    One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
    - account42 2y ago
      To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    As someone developing web games, my answer is no.
    - account42 2y ago
      Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.
      - Kiro 2y ago
        That's not up to you to decide.
- bgribble 2y ago
  > But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more. The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names. But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    > The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).
    - tredre3 2y ago
      > Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement. But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.
      - The_Colonel 2y ago
        Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  > The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great. We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled. (Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)
  - nextaccountic 2y ago
    Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic. I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.
nottorp 2y ago
> and the project is well funded by large investors. Hmm, why is there no mention of that in the splitting announcement? Did said large investors trigger the drop of SerenityOS because they don't want to waste their resources on a niche hobby platform?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- awesomekling 2y ago
  Ladybird does not have investors, only sponsors/donors. We have received some really generous donations in the past, for example $100,000 from Shopify in 2023 which allowed me to hire a few of our contributors to work full time on the project. :) Sponsors have no direct influence over the project, but I obviously feel a strong moral obligation to put 100% of the funds towards improving Ladybird and nothing else.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)
    - lukan 2y ago
      Sadly it is, when we are talking about independent open source projects.
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      That could fund my research for 5 years :(
      - nottorp 2y ago
        Yeah but one person working 5 years or 5 persons working 1 year isn't likely to be enough to make a modern browser that is feature complete enough to be able to replace the likes of Firefox, Chrome etc.
  - 2y ago
teekert 2y ago
Yeah I agree. Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. People say it’s not doable but this here is a real opportunity.
- rascul 2y ago
  > Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. Chrome is less than 20 years old.
  - ZiiS 2y ago
    KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.
    - rafram 2y ago
      There’s very little WebKit / KHTML code left in Chrome.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        There's very little NT 3.1 code left in Windows, but it's still clear how old that project is.
        trustno2 2y ago
        All unixes are descendants of original Unix from PDP-7 days. Why does it matter? ...ok the /bin /usr/bin nonsense still stays after decades, maybe you have a point
        mattl 2y ago
        Windows, macOS and Linux all have legacies of the late 80s and early 90s.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
culi 2y ago
> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it
- Zetaphor 2y ago
  > At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi The important thing to keep in mind with this announcement is that the glacial pace was previously a restriction of being attached to SerenityOS. Everything needed to be built from scratch with no reliance on third party libraries. Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.
  - destructionator 2y ago
    > Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development. now they could embed chromium LOL
  - admax88qqq 2y ago
    Indeed! Now they can use chromium and get a big running start /s I’m not sure what in the FOSS ecosystem will actually help them if they’re trying to take a fresh set of eyes on implementing a web browser. EDIT: ga sibling comment beat me to the joke
    - lcouturi 2y ago
      Well, they could build their UI using an existing toolkit, like GTK or Qt. Though, when I previously tested Ladybird it seemed to be using GTK and the current AUR package lists Qt as a dependency, so it seems they're already doing that. They could also rely on existing multimedia libraries for audio/video (ffmpeg). Those are the main things that jump out to me. There's so much ground to cover that there's probably more, though. Maybe SDL for gamepad support?
niutech 2y ago
> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market. Definitely Ladybird, but I'd also love to see Servo and Netsurf being developed.

by 1GZ0 2y ago

The_Colonel 2y ago

I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS. But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment. The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great. Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.

1GZ0 2y ago
Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really. I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.
hurutparittya 2y ago
I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".
- nacs 2y ago
  As a Firefox user, this exactly. The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on. I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
  - worble 2y ago
    I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.
    - Propelloni 2y ago
      Yes, or Waterfox [1]. [1] https://www.waterfox.net/ https://www.waterfox.net/
    - nacs 2y ago
      Thanks. Finally got around to installing Librewolf and it works great. Sensible defaults as Firefox should be.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      I will definitely second this. I moved over to librewolf last year and love it. I’m glad Mozilla is staying in business though. I know not every organization has my beliefs and I can live with that
  - HeckFeck 2y ago
    > I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF.. I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.
    - metasaval 2y ago
bambax 2y ago
On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?
- spookie 2y ago
  One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
  - account42 2y ago
    To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.
- Kiro 2y ago
  As someone developing web games, my answer is no.
  - account42 2y ago
    Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.
    - Kiro 2y ago
      That's not up to you to decide.
bgribble 2y ago
> But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more. The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names. But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  > The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).
  - tredre3 2y ago
    > Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement. But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.
bachmeier 2y ago
> The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great. We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.
kelnos 2y ago
I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled. (Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic. I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.

nottorp 2y ago

> and the project is well funded by large investors. Hmm, why is there no mention of that in the splitting announcement? Did said large investors trigger the drop of SerenityOS because they don't want to waste their resources on a niche hobby platform?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
awesomekling 2y ago
Ladybird does not have investors, only sponsors/donors. We have received some really generous donations in the past, for example $100,000 from Shopify in 2023 which allowed me to hire a few of our contributors to work full time on the project. :) Sponsors have no direct influence over the project, but I obviously feel a strong moral obligation to put 100% of the funds towards improving Ladybird and nothing else.
- nottorp 2y ago
  100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)
  - lukan 2y ago
    Sadly it is, when we are talking about independent open source projects.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    That could fund my research for 5 years :(
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Yeah but one person working 5 years or 5 persons working 1 year isn't likely to be enough to make a modern browser that is feature complete enough to be able to replace the likes of Firefox, Chrome etc.
- 2y ago

teekert 2y ago

Yeah I agree. Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. People say it’s not doable but this here is a real opportunity.

rascul 2y ago
> Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. Chrome is less than 20 years old.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.
  - rafram 2y ago
    There’s very little WebKit / KHTML code left in Chrome.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      There's very little NT 3.1 code left in Windows, but it's still clear how old that project is.
      - trustno2 2y ago
        All unixes are descendants of original Unix from PDP-7 days. Why does it matter? ...ok the /bin /usr/bin nonsense still stays after decades, maybe you have a point
        mattl 2y ago
        Windows, macOS and Linux all have legacies of the late 80s and early 90s.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago

culi 2y ago

> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it

Zetaphor 2y ago
> At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi The important thing to keep in mind with this announcement is that the glacial pace was previously a restriction of being attached to SerenityOS. Everything needed to be built from scratch with no reliance on third party libraries. Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.
- destructionator 2y ago
  > Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development. now they could embed chromium LOL
- admax88qqq 2y ago
  Indeed! Now they can use chromium and get a big running start /s I’m not sure what in the FOSS ecosystem will actually help them if they’re trying to take a fresh set of eyes on implementing a web browser. EDIT: ga sibling comment beat me to the joke
  - lcouturi 2y ago
    Well, they could build their UI using an existing toolkit, like GTK or Qt. Though, when I previously tested Ladybird it seemed to be using GTK and the current AUR package lists Qt as a dependency, so it seems they're already doing that. They could also rely on existing multimedia libraries for audio/video (ffmpeg). Those are the main things that jump out to me. There's so much ground to cover that there's probably more, though. Maybe SDL for gamepad support?

niutech 2y ago

> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market. Definitely Ladybird, but I'd also love to see Servo and Netsurf being developed.