7 ms·

In a few years, when Ladybird is stable and largely feature complete, Mozilla will act incredibly confused as to why they are losing market share. https://lady

In a few years, when Ladybird is stable and largely feature complete, Mozilla will act incredibly confused as to why they are losing market share. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/

KingOfCoders 2y ago
30+ years Firefox user, eager for Ladybird to be usable on Windows.
- guilamu 2y ago
  Won't happen anytime soon : " Will Ladybird work on Windows? We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment. "
  - RedShift1 2y ago
    Targeting the smallest market first seems like a good recipe for a project to die early
    - sulandor 2y ago
      it's not a commercial product
      - prox 2y ago
        Which is not the point. If you want to have success you need to copy the Blender/Godot model. Year by year they make great versions for all platforms, and they do well. A new browser should support both and rally the people to work on it, again like the Blender Foundation has done.
        master-lincoln 2y ago
        They already had success by their definition: having a fun project and learning stuff while working on it. Not everyone is a greedy capitalist
        prox 2y ago
        Of course thats a great metric, but to better exemplify, taking Blender again, with their pool of money (mostly donated by enthusiasts) they could really accelerate the development, hiring the best contributors on a case by case basis, which solidified the code base and continuity. What I am saying is there is a great middle ground, with a good team, where money and enthusiasm go hand in hand.
    - PhilipRoman 2y ago
      "smallest market" is relative, the Linux market for suckless tools for example is likely 10x bigger than the Windows one. For privacy focused alternative browsers I'd say its somewhere close to 50/50.
      - danielbln 2y ago
        Also, UNIX like system includes Mac, yeah?
        spookie 2y ago
        Yes
        alexvoda 2y ago
        And WSL.
    - dhx 2y ago
      The Linux ecosystem is by far the largest market for enthusiasts volunteering their time to develop a new browser. It makes sense this community would only care about building a browser for their own needs (Linux support only). Additionally and unlike Mozilla, this volunteer community is also very unlikely to care about non-enthusiasts who may complain the browser doesn't support Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), Web Environment Integrity (WEI) or whatever anti-features ad-tech companies are trying to force onto mainstream users. This volunteer community is also unlikely to care too much about whether web sites containing 10MB of obfuscated JavaScript that was developed and tested solely against Chromium-based browsers works well. I think you'd find that the community would rather spend time working on projects such as yt-dlp to just re-implement front-ends for horribly broken websites, or would simply prefer to use non-broken alternative websites. Linux is also the easiest kernel to develop against too for reasons that include _much_ better sandboxing features being available, better debugging tools and availability of source code to learn from and debug with. Contrast to Windows with undocumented or poorly documented kernel and other system library APIs, lack of source code (particularly examples of APIs being used in other software), and having to do more work to opt-in to security features that are enabled by default on a Linux system.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    I'm sure this will change. Or I need PowerPoint and Affinity on Linux.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - asicsp 2y ago
      How about dual-booting or virtual machines? Wonder if WSL supports GUIs?
      - KingOfCoders 2y ago
        Using WSL. Tried dual boot for some time, found it too cumbersome.
      - moogly 2y ago
        > Wonder if WSL supports GUIs? Yes, it's called WSLg. Uses Wayland, so many apps are a bit messed up. I think there's a way to install X11. Last time I tried it over a year ago it was a bit rough.
    - timeon 2y ago
      I have Affinity on Unix environment (macOS). You can probably use PowerPoint there as well.
      - KingOfCoders 2y ago
        After 20+ years I stopped owning Apple (Quadra, G4 Cube (favorite one), MacBooks, iMac Pro), no plan to go back to a golden cage.
- commandersaki 2y ago
  30 years? Pretty sure the options were Netscape and Mosaic.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    Yes, Mosaic (VAX, Sun), Netscape (Dec Alpha), Firefox (Linux, OSX, Windows).
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Firefox was released 20 years ago, in 2004. 30 years ago in 1994 you could have been using Linux (v0.99/1.0/1.1), Apple System 7 (not OSX), and Windows (3.2) - but not with Firefox. You might have used Lynx or NCSA Mosaic, or by the end of 1994 Mosaic Netscape (later Netscape Navigator) or beta Opera.
      - jobigoud 2y ago
        I think they were listing the lineage of browsers they used, starting from the earliest one to current one. Not that they were using Firefox 30 years ago.
- barrkel 2y ago
  Draw a trend line through Windows releases and it doesn't look good. I can't see myself upgrading to 11 any time soon and I'm seriously considering just switching to Linux. It's all I've used on work laptops since 2013 and it's just fine. I still despise Gtk 3 or whatever it is that is killing menus and sticking controls into the title bar etc. but it's fine. You don't need to use Gtk apps much these days anyway.
  - bityard 2y ago
    KDE is nice this time of year
    - account42 2y ago
      Well, they just released a new major version so maybe a bit clouded with chance of thunderstorms right now.
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  If you're using Windows, you have far bigger problems to worry about than this.
CalRobert 2y ago
Seems likely that nothing will work on ladybird or Firefox due to attestation (WEI)
- neverrroot 2y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? WEI is pretty dead
  - kasabali 2y ago
    Only for a few years until they come up with same shit but with a different name. Take a look at the presumably "dead" Palladium initiative and consider how much of it we're actually been subjected to now in our computing.
    - hughesjj 2y ago
      Or heck, SOPA
    - hooverd 2y ago
      The people pushing it weren't ostracized nearly hard enough.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    No, I fully expect it to come back and be implemented.
BaudouinVH 2y ago
The following Mastodon toot is about https://servo.org https://servo.org that could become another alternative. Quote : "Servo is faaaar from ready for general use yet, but it's picking up development speed. Definitely an option to keep an eye on for the future. "
defrost 2y ago
Servo independantly restarted last year (ex-Mozilla project from way back, Rust based web rendering engine). Already a good way through CSS and WPT test suites: https://servo.org/about/ https://servo.org/about/ That's two seperate lines of not-Chrome not-Mozilla dev in the pipeline.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Are there any (obviously as yet quite broken) browser projects using Servo?
  - defrost 2y ago
    These pre-built nightly snapshots allow developers to try Servo and report issues without building Servo locally. https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet! So .. just their own test shell compiled about engine as yet. (AFAIK) There a few longish tech talks on youtube, the initial focus was on bringing documentation up to date in order to draw third party dev's in. Now there's more focus on more coverage of test suite. It's in a decent sweet spot for certain types to get on board; new funding, new energy, room to change the guide rails and a milestone to work towards.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Well as I understand it the goal now (or arguably 'still') outside Mozilla is just the engine, not the browser that uses it (which would have been Firefox)? So there still needs to be some browser project like the Ladybird mentioned, or a Brave, or whatever that decides to use Servo instead of WebKit, is my understanding. (A bit of a tangent since not a browser, but I assume Tauri will be keen to use it.)
tgv 2y ago
I'm afraid it'll take very, very much time and effort for Ladybird to be as fast as Firefox. Web pages are terrible resource hogs. An inefficient browser will not be popular.
- dsissitka 2y ago
  > One of the long term goals is to match the performance of other production JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore and V8 when they run without a JIT compiler. https://youtu.be/n4YBMjlGWRc?t=77 https://youtu.be/n4YBMjlGWRc?t=77 I imagine a lot people won't accept that. Especially not as we're shipping more and more JavaScript.
  - mort96 2y ago
    Plus JavaScript execution speed is just one small part of web performance.
Phelinofist 2y ago
Is there a doc describing the goals of Ladybird? The page just mentions speed & security, but is privacy also one of them?
- PufPufPuf 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - shaoonb 2y ago
    Using "he" as default is just as much of a political stance as using "they" as default. The fact that whoever rejected this PR thinks that pronouns are "political" gives me a pretty good guess as to their overall political leanings.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      To me that depends on the context it's used in - if it's like: > When a user visits a web page, he expects [...] then yes, I'd even just say that's wrong, no opinion or politics about it. However if it's: > So once Alice has published the website, and Bob visits it in his browser, he expects [...] and the PR is suggesting that actually we don't know how fictional Bob identifies... Then personally I just think that's tedious, the pronouns are helpful to disambiguate Alice & Bob in shorthand anyway, and that is bringing 'political' (ish? Societal?) views into it.
      - ajdude 2y ago
        A sibling comment[1] provided the PR[2]. The change was to replace: To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and he will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`. With To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956931 [2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
        2y ago
256_ 2y ago
I can't help but see these "let's create a Web browser from scratch" projects as massive wastes of time. You can't build a sane implementation of an insane standard. Modern websites and the standards they rely on are overcomplicated. The problem lies with the standards, and the way they are used. The browser can't control that. I could never work on such a project without quickly losing motivation. Also, that link says "The main community hub is our Discord server." That doesn't inspire confidence in anything.
- Klonoar 2y ago
  Plenty of notable open source projects are on Discord. They have no issues inspiring confidence. (E.g, Dolphin emulator, who seem to have largely moved away from IRC)
moogly 2y ago
I'm not seeing anything about plugins/extensions on that page. As we all know, a browser is academic and unusable until it has extension support.
- redxtech 2y ago
  The page also says that their projected timeline for an alpha build is in 2026, so yes.
amelius 2y ago
By that time, large companies have concocted a method to make popular websites inaccessible without using the proper ad-tech API, just like DRM.
lynndotpy 2y ago
It's hard to put faith in a project that's partially AI-generated and doesn't disclose it. That picture of the laptop is the most blatant part. Is that just one contributor phoning it in for the landing page, or does that culture run deeper through the Ladybird project?
- logicprog 2y ago
  I've followed Kling's videos for years, both the ones working on serenity OS and the ones working on Ladybird, and followed the general arc of those projects and even contributed once a few year' back, and they actually seem to take the quality of their work very seriously and enjoy producing good high-quality code. I think it's just that none of them had experience with website design and the one guy who stepped up to do it happens to be one of those people that thinks AI generated stuff is fine.
devwastaken 2y ago
You don't need to rely on alpha vaporware. You can use a Firefox or chromium fork that patches out the changes and still have a quality battle tested browser.
- logicprog 2y ago
  Or alternative browsers based on WebKit

In a few years, when Ladybird is stable and largely feature complete, Mozilla will act incredibly confused as to why they are losing market share. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/

KingOfCoders 2y ago

30+ years Firefox user, eager for Ladybird to be usable on Windows.

guilamu 2y ago
Won't happen anytime soon : " Will Ladybird work on Windows? We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment. "
- RedShift1 2y ago
  Targeting the smallest market first seems like a good recipe for a project to die early
  - sulandor 2y ago
    it's not a commercial product
    - prox 2y ago
      Which is not the point. If you want to have success you need to copy the Blender/Godot model. Year by year they make great versions for all platforms, and they do well. A new browser should support both and rally the people to work on it, again like the Blender Foundation has done.
      - master-lincoln 2y ago
        They already had success by their definition: having a fun project and learning stuff while working on it. Not everyone is a greedy capitalist
        prox 2y ago
        Of course thats a great metric, but to better exemplify, taking Blender again, with their pool of money (mostly donated by enthusiasts) they could really accelerate the development, hiring the best contributors on a case by case basis, which solidified the code base and continuity. What I am saying is there is a great middle ground, with a good team, where money and enthusiasm go hand in hand.
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    "smallest market" is relative, the Linux market for suckless tools for example is likely 10x bigger than the Windows one. For privacy focused alternative browsers I'd say its somewhere close to 50/50.
    - danielbln 2y ago
      Also, UNIX like system includes Mac, yeah?
      - spookie 2y ago
        Yes
      - alexvoda 2y ago
        And WSL.
  - dhx 2y ago
    The Linux ecosystem is by far the largest market for enthusiasts volunteering their time to develop a new browser. It makes sense this community would only care about building a browser for their own needs (Linux support only). Additionally and unlike Mozilla, this volunteer community is also very unlikely to care about non-enthusiasts who may complain the browser doesn't support Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), Web Environment Integrity (WEI) or whatever anti-features ad-tech companies are trying to force onto mainstream users. This volunteer community is also unlikely to care too much about whether web sites containing 10MB of obfuscated JavaScript that was developed and tested solely against Chromium-based browsers works well. I think you'd find that the community would rather spend time working on projects such as yt-dlp to just re-implement front-ends for horribly broken websites, or would simply prefer to use non-broken alternative websites. Linux is also the easiest kernel to develop against too for reasons that include _much_ better sandboxing features being available, better debugging tools and availability of source code to learn from and debug with. Contrast to Windows with undocumented or poorly documented kernel and other system library APIs, lack of source code (particularly examples of APIs being used in other software), and having to do more work to opt-in to security features that are enabled by default on a Linux system.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  I'm sure this will change. Or I need PowerPoint and Affinity on Linux.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - asicsp 2y ago
    How about dual-booting or virtual machines? Wonder if WSL supports GUIs?
    - KingOfCoders 2y ago
      Using WSL. Tried dual boot for some time, found it too cumbersome.
    - moogly 2y ago
      > Wonder if WSL supports GUIs? Yes, it's called WSLg. Uses Wayland, so many apps are a bit messed up. I think there's a way to install X11. Last time I tried it over a year ago it was a bit rough.
  - timeon 2y ago
    I have Affinity on Unix environment (macOS). You can probably use PowerPoint there as well.
    - KingOfCoders 2y ago
      After 20+ years I stopped owning Apple (Quadra, G4 Cube (favorite one), MacBooks, iMac Pro), no plan to go back to a golden cage.
commandersaki 2y ago
30 years? Pretty sure the options were Netscape and Mosaic.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Yes, Mosaic (VAX, Sun), Netscape (Dec Alpha), Firefox (Linux, OSX, Windows).
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Firefox was released 20 years ago, in 2004. 30 years ago in 1994 you could have been using Linux (v0.99/1.0/1.1), Apple System 7 (not OSX), and Windows (3.2) - but not with Firefox. You might have used Lynx or NCSA Mosaic, or by the end of 1994 Mosaic Netscape (later Netscape Navigator) or beta Opera.
    - jobigoud 2y ago
      I think they were listing the lineage of browsers they used, starting from the earliest one to current one. Not that they were using Firefox 30 years ago.
barrkel 2y ago
Draw a trend line through Windows releases and it doesn't look good. I can't see myself upgrading to 11 any time soon and I'm seriously considering just switching to Linux. It's all I've used on work laptops since 2013 and it's just fine. I still despise Gtk 3 or whatever it is that is killing menus and sticking controls into the title bar etc. but it's fine. You don't need to use Gtk apps much these days anyway.
- bityard 2y ago
  KDE is nice this time of year
  - account42 2y ago
    Well, they just released a new major version so maybe a bit clouded with chance of thunderstorms right now.
soraminazuki 2y ago
If you're using Windows, you have far bigger problems to worry about than this.

CalRobert 2y ago

Seems likely that nothing will work on ladybird or Firefox due to attestation (WEI)

neverrroot 2y ago
Are you being sarcastic? WEI is pretty dead
- kasabali 2y ago
  Only for a few years until they come up with same shit but with a different name. Take a look at the presumably "dead" Palladium initiative and consider how much of it we're actually been subjected to now in our computing.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    Or heck, SOPA
  - hooverd 2y ago
    The people pushing it weren't ostracized nearly hard enough.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  No, I fully expect it to come back and be implemented.

BaudouinVH 2y ago

The following Mastodon toot is about https://servo.org https://servo.org that could become another alternative. Quote : "Servo is faaaar from ready for general use yet, but it's picking up development speed. Definitely an option to keep an eye on for the future. "

defrost 2y ago

Servo independantly restarted last year (ex-Mozilla project from way back, Rust based web rendering engine). Already a good way through CSS and WPT test suites: https://servo.org/about/ https://servo.org/about/ That's two seperate lines of not-Chrome not-Mozilla dev in the pipeline.

OJFord 2y ago
Are there any (obviously as yet quite broken) browser projects using Servo?
- defrost 2y ago
  These pre-built nightly snapshots allow developers to try Servo and report issues without building Servo locally. https://servo.org/download/ https://servo.org/download/ Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet! So .. just their own test shell compiled about engine as yet. (AFAIK) There a few longish tech talks on youtube, the initial focus was on bringing documentation up to date in order to draw third party dev's in. Now there's more focus on more coverage of test suite. It's in a decent sweet spot for certain types to get on board; new funding, new energy, room to change the guide rails and a milestone to work towards.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Well as I understand it the goal now (or arguably 'still') outside Mozilla is just the engine, not the browser that uses it (which would have been Firefox)? So there still needs to be some browser project like the Ladybird mentioned, or a Brave, or whatever that decides to use Servo instead of WebKit, is my understanding. (A bit of a tangent since not a browser, but I assume Tauri will be keen to use it.)

tgv 2y ago

I'm afraid it'll take very, very much time and effort for Ladybird to be as fast as Firefox. Web pages are terrible resource hogs. An inefficient browser will not be popular.

dsissitka 2y ago
> One of the long term goals is to match the performance of other production JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore and V8 when they run without a JIT compiler. https://youtu.be/n4YBMjlGWRc?t=77 https://youtu.be/n4YBMjlGWRc?t=77 I imagine a lot people won't accept that. Especially not as we're shipping more and more JavaScript.
- mort96 2y ago
  Plus JavaScript execution speed is just one small part of web performance.

Phelinofist 2y ago

Is there a doc describing the goals of Ladybird? The page just mentions speed & security, but is privacy also one of them?

PufPufPuf 2y ago
[flagged]
- shaoonb 2y ago
  Using "he" as default is just as much of a political stance as using "they" as default. The fact that whoever rejected this PR thinks that pronouns are "political" gives me a pretty good guess as to their overall political leanings.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    To me that depends on the context it's used in - if it's like: > When a user visits a web page, he expects [...] then yes, I'd even just say that's wrong, no opinion or politics about it. However if it's: > So once Alice has published the website, and Bob visits it in his browser, he expects [...] and the PR is suggesting that actually we don't know how fictional Bob identifies... Then personally I just think that's tedious, the pronouns are helpful to disambiguate Alice & Bob in shorthand anyway, and that is bringing 'political' (ish? Societal?) views into it.
    - ajdude 2y ago
      A sibling comment[1] provided the PR[2]. The change was to replace: To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and he will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`. With To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956931 [2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
      - 2y ago

256_ 2y ago

I can't help but see these "let's create a Web browser from scratch" projects as massive wastes of time. You can't build a sane implementation of an insane standard. Modern websites and the standards they rely on are overcomplicated. The problem lies with the standards, and the way they are used. The browser can't control that. I could never work on such a project without quickly losing motivation. Also, that link says "The main community hub is our Discord server." That doesn't inspire confidence in anything.

Klonoar 2y ago
Plenty of notable open source projects are on Discord. They have no issues inspiring confidence. (E.g, Dolphin emulator, who seem to have largely moved away from IRC)

moogly 2y ago

I'm not seeing anything about plugins/extensions on that page. As we all know, a browser is academic and unusable until it has extension support.

redxtech 2y ago
The page also says that their projected timeline for an alpha build is in 2026, so yes.

amelius 2y ago

By that time, large companies have concocted a method to make popular websites inaccessible without using the proper ad-tech API, just like DRM.

lynndotpy 2y ago

It's hard to put faith in a project that's partially AI-generated and doesn't disclose it. That picture of the laptop is the most blatant part. Is that just one contributor phoning it in for the landing page, or does that culture run deeper through the Ladybird project?

logicprog 2y ago
I've followed Kling's videos for years, both the ones working on serenity OS and the ones working on Ladybird, and followed the general arc of those projects and even contributed once a few year' back, and they actually seem to take the quality of their work very seriously and enjoy producing good high-quality code. I think it's just that none of them had experience with website design and the one guy who stepped up to do it happens to be one of those people that thinks AI generated stuff is fine.

devwastaken 2y ago

You don't need to rely on alpha vaporware. You can use a Firefox or chromium fork that patches out the changes and still have a quality battle tested browser.

logicprog 2y ago
Or alternative browsers based on WebKit