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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

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k Happy to answer questions :)

SushiHippie 2y ago
How does ladybird compare to Servo? https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
- rizky05 2y ago
  Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the whole thing.
  - niutech 2y ago
    Servoshell is the web browser built around Servo, there is also Qt Servo Webview: https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview
- awesomekling 2y 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! :)
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    > Servo wants to build an embeddable engine That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. (Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)
    - spankalee 2y ago
      It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the engine for a new browser.
      - mminer237 2y ago
        You can download Servo right now and use it as a browser: https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.
        diego_sandoval 2y ago
        But it's memory safe.
      - SushiHippie 2y ago
        Agreed, I really hope that someday we'll get a full rust browser, because rust is a language where I could see myself contributing (e.g. fixing bugs that annoy me when using it all day) to it, compared to other languages like C/C++.
    - Ygg2 2y ago
      >that wasn’t the original goal They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing. > It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.
      - mananaysiempre 2y ago
        Re better embeddability, sure. As best as I can tell the Firefox devs have been feeling some amount of dismay due to the fact that everyone embeds Chromium/Blink, despite the whole Mozilla/XUL thing having been built more as an application platform rather than as a foundation for one specific web browser. And that’s entirely understandable, as is attempting to do better on the second go-round. But now it seems that Servo is explicitly targeting embedding and -adjacent use cases only, and that’s a post-Mozilla thing. Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.
  - trustno2 2y ago
    The talk about correctness gets me thinking. If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning? Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.
    - the_duke 2y ago
      Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does". Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.
      - Ygg2 2y ago
        We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.
        Shugyousha 2y ago
        > We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google. and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.
        trustno2 2y ago
        Chromium is basically everything important anyway; Chrome is some sprinkle on top (I think some DRM stuff?)
skywal_l 2y 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!
- awesomekling 2y 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!
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    I hope that you continue your herculean efforts to investigate the specs and insist on correctness; the resulting implementations, dug up inconsistencies and edge cases will undoubtedly be of independent interest and invaluable to the community.
  - ledgerdev 2y 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 No kidding... how about get it roughly working on hacker news, and make it the hackers way to start each day, and pull in as much help and community as possible from here?
yuvadam 2y ago
How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Ask for money from the start?
  - account42 2y ago
    And don't ignore or intentionally alienate the users who might be inclined to donate.
- awesomekling 2y 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. :)
  - yuvadam 2y ago
    Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort. Are you planning on charging your users?
    - tinco 2y ago
      I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful. Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.
courseofaction 2y ago
What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many things, but purely browser focused is not it.
  - PedroBatista 2y ago
    I would say the browser it’s not even in their mind at this point. High level people inside Mozilla not only implied but said it directly.
    - ajrowls 2y ago
      Source for this claim?
    - nalinidash 2y ago
      Though,very recently,they are giving more attention to Firefox, or at least want us to see this way. For example: the reddit AMA on firefox unofficial subreddit[1],the mozilla connect post on things they are working on[2]etc. [1]:https://new.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_firefox_leadership_team_at_mozilla_ama/ https://new.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_f... [2]:https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
- beretguy 2y ago
  Maybe they’ll add tab groups.
  - nalinidash 2y ago
    They are currently working on it.
- 2y ago
ironmagma 2y ago
If Ladybird is "forked" from SerenityOS now, does that mean the mainline won't run on Serenity any longer?
- awesomekling 2y 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.
PedroBatista 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y 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/ https://test262.fyi/ (although the number might be a little outdated, it's supposed to be higher! Need to investigate this..)
Y_Y 2y ago
What's the trouble with the Android port?
- awesomekling 2y 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 2y 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?
- pferde 2y 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?
  - dandellion 2y ago
    Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.
    - komadori 2y ago
      Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a member of so many interesting communities across a range of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely on the company to keep it going as it is.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    > but Discord? In this day and age? What’s your recommended alternative?
    - guappa 2y ago
      discuss?
    - 2y ago
ColinHayhurst 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y 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.
  - ColinHayhurst 2y ago
    With no ties, direct AND indirect, that does make Ladybird uncommon, like Pale Moon. Our own approach to privacy is as radical as it gets in search: "No Tracking, Just Search". As we often say: tracking, not ads, is the fundamental problem. Contextual ads do not need necessarily to have tracking. Though the duopoly of search ad networks makes that a hard road too. Good luck. Excited to see how Ladybird progresses.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Well, your tie to the advertising industry is that large parts of the web are funded by advertising. Get too anti-advertising and servers will just treat you as an ad blocker and find ways to stop serving you.
kosolam 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y 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.
  - criddell 2y ago
    Relying on open standards is risky. It seems to me the de facto standard is whatever Chrome or Blink does.
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      That's the unique value proposition of Ladybird. It uses the open standards as the jumping point, investigates and de facto documents the divergence of modern browsers from them. It is a precious and important work.
      - criddell 2y ago
        How is knowing where the published standards diverge from de facto standards precious and important work? You say that's where the value is, but the subset of people and organizations who would pay for that (if it's valuable, people will pay, right?) has to be pretty small.
        ykonstant 2y ago
wwwwwwwweb 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y ago
  We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100% chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)
  - kamov 2y ago
    Whatever language you end up choosing, I hope it will be a memory safe one. Browsers' main purpose is to interact with the outside world, and they even have to run third party code (JS) all the time, so minimizing attack surface would go a long way I think
    - awesomekling 2y ago
      Yes, our next language will be a memory safe one.
      - ArtixFox 2y ago
        pls pls pls go for one of those languages with some level of formal verification! it'd be soo cool to see a formally verified browser! But, ladybird is one of the coolest things I saw in 2024!!!
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    Clearly there is a furious internal war between CLispers and Haskellers!
  - ledgerdev 2y ago
    My favorite type of discussion! Language choice would seem super important long, long term and could provide long run advantage over other engines. Given the goals and philosophy of Ladybird zig seems like a complementary choice, and headed in the same direction in terms of community and freedom. And Perhaps just a sprinkle of something more verifiable than zig on the edges where correctness and safety are super critical. Have a look into tigerbeatle (https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TIGER_STYLE.md https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...) and their philosophy.
deleted 2y ago
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networked 2y 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_g 2y 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…
- awesomekling 2y 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.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities." Sounds good. If it also makes it into Serenty OS eventually, it would suddenly make Serenety OS a lot more accessible and useful for way more people. But I think you are aware of this and also of the challenges. Building a working browser is hard enough on its own.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)
  - networked 2y ago
    I thought someone might would take issue with it. :-) I didn't qualify "legacy" for succinctness and because I have a sense Power ISA users prefer ppc64le.
codetrotter 2y ago
Holy cheeseballs! That’s amazing. Big congrats, you deserve it :D
pkphilip 2y ago
Andreas, this is awesome :)! But please do consider putting up some screenshots of the browser - including how it renders the popular sites.
fouc 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y 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 2y 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.
Oxodao 2y 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 ?
- awesomekling 2y 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.
  - Oxodao 2y ago
    Thanks! Good luck with your project, this single-handedly gave me back faith in the modern web when I found out a few month ago about the progress you guys made since I last saw it
account42 2y 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?
- awesomekling 2y 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 :)
  - acedTrex 2y ago
    I think thats a very smart plan, get the websites that devs frequent up and running relatively reliably to help drive more dev use and therefore more willing contributors.
- Ygg2 2y 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).
hakanderyal 2y 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 2y 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
- awesomekling 2y ago
  We will absolutely have the ability to block ads. The web is downright unpleasant without this feature!
jchw 2y 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.
- tracker1 2y 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.
  - jchw 2y ago
    Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all. If the web was not controlled by corporations, DRM as part of the platform 100% would have simply never happened. From my point of view, putting DRM into web browsers is actively bad for a couple of reasons beyond the usual arguments against DRM. The greatest asset the web platform has is that it's a unified, open platform that anyone can participate in; Of course, DRM harms users too, but specifically DRM harms the web as a platform. You can't simply have a "full" web browser that can browse the entirety of the web (as ordinary users understand it) without licensing Widevine. To date, only large corporate web browsers have ever gotten this privilege[1]; community web browsers are shit out of luck, almost certainly forever. Not only that, but Widevine will only officially support a small subset of the operating systems that are out there, ensuring that you can't get a "full" web browsing experience on, for example, any BSD (at least not without manual work and violating several license agreements on the way.) Even if Ladybird bucks the trend and manages to get a Widevine license somehow, it will only be possible to make this work on Windows, Linux and macOS. Yes, I understand this covers the vast majority of users, but if you can't see how this is extraordinarily antithetical to the open web I don't really know what else to say. The web didn't even begin on any of those platforms! Of course, I seriously can't blame Ladybird if they want to go this route. After all, in the position that Ladybird is in, pragmatism is a stance that is hard to beat. Ladybird currently doesn't have the muscle to flex to try to influence the future of the web platform in such a way, especially not against the will of the mega-corp overlords that currently control the web platform. If I had to guess, I'd guess the lack of an answer to my question is because taking the pragmatic stance on this particular issue will prove controversial, though I hope if that is the case that people continue to direct their ire towards W3C and Mozilla who pretty much immediately folded when the issue came up in the first place. In the moment when Flash and Silverlight died, there was a small sliver of hope that DRM on the web would die with it, but instead we wove DRM directly into the fabric of the web, and Mozilla, no doubt afraid to watch their marketshare dwindle even further, (which it has continued to do anyways, mind you,) played a huge part in that. Issues like this are why there is guaranteed to be vile toxicity when something like WEI comes up. We know that there is no entity out there holding the line to protect the web platform; once one of these technologies like WEI makes it into Chrome, the era of the open web will have essentially ended. If you believe that the open web is important, then any technology that's vaguely WEI shaped is enemy #1, and when there is no other option, people will choose violence, again and again. DRM on the web isn't really quite as dire of a situation, but it isn't particularly great either. (One might wonder what the point of keeping DRM out of the browser is, forcing users to use separate software, making their overall experience worse... but that's kind of the thing: Why in the fuck should these vendors and this DRM'd content, that is antithetical to the open web, get to benefit from the web platform built and used mostly by people who stand to gain nothing from it? If you want the benefit of the web platform and all it offers, you should be forced to lose the DRM. Otherwise, have fun deploying your own native software.) [1]: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview
ledgerdev 2y 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.
- freedomben 2y 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.
  - ledgerdev 2y ago
    Yeah, wasn't thinking about actually building it out, just mocking it out and taking into consideration to allow for it as you build out browser. So much easier to plan for rails, rather than foist into something later on. edit: > Focus on building good APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely useful whether for local LLMs. I think we're saying the same thing, focus on good extension points for the local LLM use case.
freedomben 2y 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.
- awesomekling 2y 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. :)
klohto 2y ago
is there still space on your crew? i’d love to join, should i just start committing?
- awesomekling 2y 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 :)
  - klohto 2y ago
    Thanks Andreas! Completely forgot about the current Discord meta.
rurban 2y ago
Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi
mikkelam 2y ago
I absolutely adore your coding videos where you implement new features. Any chance we'll get more of those with Ladybird?
vrinsd 2y 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 2y 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 https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    The plugins for Dillo are only protocol plugins; there are no file format plugins and no other kinds of plugins. However, I mentioned they should implement file format plugins too; other people also wanted this, and it does seem to be wanted enough that they might do it. (Other plugins will be more complicated to consider how to support it)
  - gigatexal 2y ago
    Exactly. I need 1Password and a vim mode plugin for me to be productive on the web.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      Same, bitwarden is essential, as are ublock origin and privacy guard.
      - dotcoma 2y ago
        I second Bitwarden, ublock origin and privacy guard. Also: how will you handle bookmarks? IMHO only Chrome does a good job with bookmarks — please copy them instead of reinventing the wheel.
matlin 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 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?
- pilaf 2y 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).
gigatexal 2y 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 2y 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.
- demosthanos 2y 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.
healsdata 2y ago
[flagged]
- flumpcakes 2y ago
  I think you're grossly putting your own political viewpoint on this non-issue and frankly accusing someone of sexism based pro-nouns used in documentation. This is ridiculous. I can read documentation with "he" I can read it with "her". I am adult enough to know it's talking about a hypothetical reader. Fighting a culture war at every corner is just furthering the toxic environment we all live in.
  - healsdata 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - flumpcakes 2y ago
      This is absolutely ridiculous take. If true, I'm not sure how any work gets done in America.
      - naught0 2y ago
        > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Meanwhile the "flagged" comment is thoughtful, engaged, and not remotely insulting. Interesting.
  - naught0 2y ago
    If it's such a non-issue and doesn't indicate the predilections of the author, why not change it to be neutral? Where is the harm? Isn't being more inclusive on an open source project better? It seems the author is taking an explicitly political stance by vehemently opposing something as simple as neutral pronouns in a README.
Zaskoda 2y 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?
alberth 2y 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 2y 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?
  - alberth 2y ago
    There’s websites decided to pointing out which standards various browsers do & don’t support. https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ (An older not as relevant one is http://acid3.acidtests.org/ http://acid3.acidtests.org/ )
DaoVeles 2y 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.
- pilaf 2y 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.
  - DaoVeles 2y ago
    Well that explains in part his knowledge of web rending tech. Very cool.
DiggyJohnson 2y 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 2y ago
This is awesome news, congrats and keep up the great work :)
atlas_hugged 2y ago
[flagged]
- orsorna 2y ago
  After reading your comment I went over to the Github but failed to find the PR you described. Perhaps you can locate it? I did find this: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/files https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/files Do you think PRs like this carry an appropriate tone that demands they be addressed and merged?
  - fabrice_d 2y ago
    See https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 There's not much grace to find in the response of awesomekling in this PR.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sph 2y ago
      Don't you guys have anything better to do? You know, write code, instead of bothering people about nonsense like this, getting offended and crying on the fediverse? What the hell happened to people?
- veeti 2y ago
  Don't forget that the GitHub cofounder is the same person who dared to have a meritocracy rug [1]! Cancel, cancel, cancel. https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/ https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/
roadbuster 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
congrats my dude! and when windows & android version available, i don't mind 10 bucks per month subscription at all.
JimDabell 2y 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://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/ https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/ https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures
sph 2y 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.
- phyzome 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - sph 2y ago
    Get a hobby.
    - phyzome 2y ago
      Sounds like you're pretty upset about the idea that switching documentation to gender-neutral language is a good change. (What do hobbies have to do with this?)
      - sph 2y ago
        You are spending far too much time online if three neutral words sound like being "pretty upset" to you. There's grass to be touched outside. No one really cares. You should find a better hobby than getting offended because people that have a different world view than yours. Part of growing up is learning to deal with this fact.
giancarlostoro 2y 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 2y 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?

SushiHippie 2y ago

How does ladybird compare to Servo? https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/

rizky05 2y ago
Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the whole thing.
- niutech 2y ago
  Servoshell is the web browser built around Servo, there is also Qt Servo Webview: https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview
awesomekling 2y 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! :)
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  > Servo wants to build an embeddable engine That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. (Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)
  - spankalee 2y ago
    It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the engine for a new browser.
    - mminer237 2y ago
      You can download Servo right now and use it as a browser: https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.
      - diego_sandoval 2y ago
        But it's memory safe.
    - SushiHippie 2y ago
      Agreed, I really hope that someday we'll get a full rust browser, because rust is a language where I could see myself contributing (e.g. fixing bugs that annoy me when using it all day) to it, compared to other languages like C/C++.
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    >that wasn’t the original goal They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing. > It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      Re better embeddability, sure. As best as I can tell the Firefox devs have been feeling some amount of dismay due to the fact that everyone embeds Chromium/Blink, despite the whole Mozilla/XUL thing having been built more as an application platform rather than as a foundation for one specific web browser. And that’s entirely understandable, as is attempting to do better on the second go-round. But now it seems that Servo is explicitly targeting embedding and -adjacent use cases only, and that’s a post-Mozilla thing. Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.
- trustno2 2y ago
  The talk about correctness gets me thinking. If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning? Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.
  - the_duke 2y ago
    Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does". Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.
    - Ygg2 2y ago
      We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.
      - Shugyousha 2y ago
        > We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google. and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.
        trustno2 2y ago
        Chromium is basically everything important anyway; Chrome is some sprinkle on top (I think some DRM stuff?)

skywal_l 2y 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!

awesomekling 2y 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!
- ykonstant 2y ago
  I hope that you continue your herculean efforts to investigate the specs and insist on correctness; the resulting implementations, dug up inconsistencies and edge cases will undoubtedly be of independent interest and invaluable to the community.
- ledgerdev 2y 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 No kidding... how about get it roughly working on hacker news, and make it the hackers way to start each day, and pull in as much help and community as possible from here?

yuvadam 2y ago

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

Aeolun 2y ago
Ask for money from the start?
- account42 2y ago
  And don't ignore or intentionally alienate the users who might be inclined to donate.
awesomekling 2y 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. :)
- yuvadam 2y ago
  Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort. Are you planning on charging your users?
  - tinco 2y ago
    I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful. Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.

courseofaction 2y ago

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

Aeolun 2y ago
Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many things, but purely browser focused is not it.
- PedroBatista 2y ago
  I would say the browser it’s not even in their mind at this point. High level people inside Mozilla not only implied but said it directly.
  - ajrowls 2y ago
    Source for this claim?
  - nalinidash 2y ago
    Though,very recently,they are giving more attention to Firefox, or at least want us to see this way. For example: the reddit AMA on firefox unofficial subreddit[1],the mozilla connect post on things they are working on[2]etc. [1]:https://new.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_firefox_leadership_team_at_mozilla_ama/ https://new.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_f... [2]:https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
beretguy 2y ago
Maybe they’ll add tab groups.
- nalinidash 2y ago
  They are currently working on it.
2y ago

ironmagma 2y ago

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

awesomekling 2y 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.

PedroBatista 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y 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/ https://test262.fyi/ (although the number might be a little outdated, it's supposed to be higher! Need to investigate this..)

Y_Y 2y ago

What's the trouble with the Android port?

awesomekling 2y 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 2y 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?

pferde 2y 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?
- dandellion 2y ago
  Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.
  - komadori 2y ago
    Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a member of so many interesting communities across a range of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely on the company to keep it going as it is.
- paulcole 2y ago
  > but Discord? In this day and age? What’s your recommended alternative?
  - guappa 2y ago
    discuss?
  - 2y ago

ColinHayhurst 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y 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.
- ColinHayhurst 2y ago
  With no ties, direct AND indirect, that does make Ladybird uncommon, like Pale Moon. Our own approach to privacy is as radical as it gets in search: "No Tracking, Just Search". As we often say: tracking, not ads, is the fundamental problem. Contextual ads do not need necessarily to have tracking. Though the duopoly of search ad networks makes that a hard road too. Good luck. Excited to see how Ladybird progresses.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Well, your tie to the advertising industry is that large parts of the web are funded by advertising. Get too anti-advertising and servers will just treat you as an ad blocker and find ways to stop serving you.

kosolam 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y 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.
- criddell 2y ago
  Relying on open standards is risky. It seems to me the de facto standard is whatever Chrome or Blink does.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    That's the unique value proposition of Ladybird. It uses the open standards as the jumping point, investigates and de facto documents the divergence of modern browsers from them. It is a precious and important work.
    - criddell 2y ago
      How is knowing where the published standards diverge from de facto standards precious and important work? You say that's where the value is, but the subset of people and organizations who would pay for that (if it's valuable, people will pay, right?) has to be pretty small.
      - ykonstant 2y ago

wwwwwwwweb 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y ago
We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100% chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)
- kamov 2y ago
  Whatever language you end up choosing, I hope it will be a memory safe one. Browsers' main purpose is to interact with the outside world, and they even have to run third party code (JS) all the time, so minimizing attack surface would go a long way I think
  - awesomekling 2y ago
    Yes, our next language will be a memory safe one.
    - ArtixFox 2y ago
      pls pls pls go for one of those languages with some level of formal verification! it'd be soo cool to see a formally verified browser! But, ladybird is one of the coolest things I saw in 2024!!!
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Clearly there is a furious internal war between CLispers and Haskellers!
- ledgerdev 2y ago
  My favorite type of discussion! Language choice would seem super important long, long term and could provide long run advantage over other engines. Given the goals and philosophy of Ladybird zig seems like a complementary choice, and headed in the same direction in terms of community and freedom. And Perhaps just a sprinkle of something more verifiable than zig on the edges where correctness and safety are super critical. Have a look into tigerbeatle (https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TIGER_STYLE.md https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...) and their philosophy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

networked 2y 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_g 2y 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…
awesomekling 2y 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.
- lukan 2y ago
  "2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities." Sounds good. If it also makes it into Serenty OS eventually, it would suddenly make Serenety OS a lot more accessible and useful for way more people. But I think you are aware of this and also of the challenges. Building a working browser is hard enough on its own.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)
- networked 2y ago
  I thought someone might would take issue with it. :-) I didn't qualify "legacy" for succinctness and because I have a sense Power ISA users prefer ppc64le.

codetrotter 2y ago

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

pkphilip 2y ago

Andreas, this is awesome :)! But please do consider putting up some screenshots of the browser - including how it renders the popular sites.

fouc 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y 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 2y 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.

Oxodao 2y 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 ?

awesomekling 2y 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.
- Oxodao 2y ago
  Thanks! Good luck with your project, this single-handedly gave me back faith in the modern web when I found out a few month ago about the progress you guys made since I last saw it

account42 2y 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?

awesomekling 2y 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 :)
- acedTrex 2y ago
  I think thats a very smart plan, get the websites that devs frequent up and running relatively reliably to help drive more dev use and therefore more willing contributors.
Ygg2 2y 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).

hakanderyal 2y 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 2y 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

awesomekling 2y ago
We will absolutely have the ability to block ads. The web is downright unpleasant without this feature!

jchw 2y 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.

tracker1 2y 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.
- jchw 2y ago
  Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all. If the web was not controlled by corporations, DRM as part of the platform 100% would have simply never happened. From my point of view, putting DRM into web browsers is actively bad for a couple of reasons beyond the usual arguments against DRM. The greatest asset the web platform has is that it's a unified, open platform that anyone can participate in; Of course, DRM harms users too, but specifically DRM harms the web as a platform. You can't simply have a "full" web browser that can browse the entirety of the web (as ordinary users understand it) without licensing Widevine. To date, only large corporate web browsers have ever gotten this privilege[1]; community web browsers are shit out of luck, almost certainly forever. Not only that, but Widevine will only officially support a small subset of the operating systems that are out there, ensuring that you can't get a "full" web browsing experience on, for example, any BSD (at least not without manual work and violating several license agreements on the way.) Even if Ladybird bucks the trend and manages to get a Widevine license somehow, it will only be possible to make this work on Windows, Linux and macOS. Yes, I understand this covers the vast majority of users, but if you can't see how this is extraordinarily antithetical to the open web I don't really know what else to say. The web didn't even begin on any of those platforms! Of course, I seriously can't blame Ladybird if they want to go this route. After all, in the position that Ladybird is in, pragmatism is a stance that is hard to beat. Ladybird currently doesn't have the muscle to flex to try to influence the future of the web platform in such a way, especially not against the will of the mega-corp overlords that currently control the web platform. If I had to guess, I'd guess the lack of an answer to my question is because taking the pragmatic stance on this particular issue will prove controversial, though I hope if that is the case that people continue to direct their ire towards W3C and Mozilla who pretty much immediately folded when the issue came up in the first place. In the moment when Flash and Silverlight died, there was a small sliver of hope that DRM on the web would die with it, but instead we wove DRM directly into the fabric of the web, and Mozilla, no doubt afraid to watch their marketshare dwindle even further, (which it has continued to do anyways, mind you,) played a huge part in that. Issues like this are why there is guaranteed to be vile toxicity when something like WEI comes up. We know that there is no entity out there holding the line to protect the web platform; once one of these technologies like WEI makes it into Chrome, the era of the open web will have essentially ended. If you believe that the open web is important, then any technology that's vaguely WEI shaped is enemy #1, and when there is no other option, people will choose violence, again and again. DRM on the web isn't really quite as dire of a situation, but it isn't particularly great either. (One might wonder what the point of keeping DRM out of the browser is, forcing users to use separate software, making their overall experience worse... but that's kind of the thing: Why in the fuck should these vendors and this DRM'd content, that is antithetical to the open web, get to benefit from the web platform built and used mostly by people who stand to gain nothing from it? If you want the benefit of the web platform and all it offers, you should be forced to lose the DRM. Otherwise, have fun deploying your own native software.) [1]: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview

ledgerdev 2y 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.

freedomben 2y 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.
- ledgerdev 2y ago
  Yeah, wasn't thinking about actually building it out, just mocking it out and taking into consideration to allow for it as you build out browser. So much easier to plan for rails, rather than foist into something later on. edit: > Focus on building good APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely useful whether for local LLMs. I think we're saying the same thing, focus on good extension points for the local LLM use case.

freedomben 2y 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.

awesomekling 2y 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. :)

klohto 2y ago

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

awesomekling 2y 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 :)
- klohto 2y ago
  Thanks Andreas! Completely forgot about the current Discord meta.

rurban 2y ago

Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi

mikkelam 2y ago

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

vrinsd 2y 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 2y 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 https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  The plugins for Dillo are only protocol plugins; there are no file format plugins and no other kinds of plugins. However, I mentioned they should implement file format plugins too; other people also wanted this, and it does seem to be wanted enough that they might do it. (Other plugins will be more complicated to consider how to support it)
- gigatexal 2y ago
  Exactly. I need 1Password and a vim mode plugin for me to be productive on the web.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Same, bitwarden is essential, as are ublock origin and privacy guard.
    - dotcoma 2y ago
      I second Bitwarden, ublock origin and privacy guard. Also: how will you handle bookmarks? IMHO only Chrome does a good job with bookmarks — please copy them instead of reinventing the wheel.

matlin 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 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?

pilaf 2y 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).

gigatexal 2y 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 2y 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.

demosthanos 2y 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.

healsdata 2y ago

[flagged]

flumpcakes 2y ago
I think you're grossly putting your own political viewpoint on this non-issue and frankly accusing someone of sexism based pro-nouns used in documentation. This is ridiculous. I can read documentation with "he" I can read it with "her". I am adult enough to know it's talking about a hypothetical reader. Fighting a culture war at every corner is just furthering the toxic environment we all live in.
- healsdata 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - flumpcakes 2y ago
    This is absolutely ridiculous take. If true, I'm not sure how any work gets done in America.
    - naught0 2y ago
      > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Meanwhile the "flagged" comment is thoughtful, engaged, and not remotely insulting. Interesting.
- naught0 2y ago
  If it's such a non-issue and doesn't indicate the predilections of the author, why not change it to be neutral? Where is the harm? Isn't being more inclusive on an open source project better? It seems the author is taking an explicitly political stance by vehemently opposing something as simple as neutral pronouns in a README.

Zaskoda 2y 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?

alberth 2y 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 2y 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?
- alberth 2y ago
  There’s websites decided to pointing out which standards various browsers do & don’t support. https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ (An older not as relevant one is http://acid3.acidtests.org/ http://acid3.acidtests.org/ )

DaoVeles 2y 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.

pilaf 2y 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.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  Well that explains in part his knowledge of web rending tech. Very cool.

DiggyJohnson 2y 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 2y ago

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

atlas_hugged 2y ago

[flagged]

orsorna 2y ago
After reading your comment I went over to the Github but failed to find the PR you described. Perhaps you can locate it? I did find this: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/files https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/files Do you think PRs like this carry an appropriate tone that demands they be addressed and merged?
- fabrice_d 2y ago
  See https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 There's not much grace to find in the response of awesomekling in this PR.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sph 2y ago
    Don't you guys have anything better to do? You know, write code, instead of bothering people about nonsense like this, getting offended and crying on the fediverse? What the hell happened to people?
veeti 2y ago
Don't forget that the GitHub cofounder is the same person who dared to have a meritocracy rug [1]! Cancel, cancel, cancel. https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/ https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/

roadbuster 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago

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

JimDabell 2y 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://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/ https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/ https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures

sph 2y 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.

phyzome 2y ago
[flagged]
- sph 2y ago
  Get a hobby.
  - phyzome 2y ago
    Sounds like you're pretty upset about the idea that switching documentation to gender-neutral language is a good change. (What do hobbies have to do with this?)
    - sph 2y ago
      You are spending far too much time online if three neutral words sound like being "pretty upset" to you. There's grass to be touched outside. No one really cares. You should find a better hobby than getting offended because people that have a different world view than yours. Part of growing up is learning to deal with this fact.

giancarlostoro 2y 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 2y 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?