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This Month in Ladybird
- samuell 1y agoThis is such an important project, to keep the big corporations from completely controlling the future of the web. And it doesn't hurt that Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy.
- larodi 1y agoInteresting whether guys employ LLM to speed up development. Starting a new browser just like this would be very bold decision like 15 years ago, now seems like a reasonable thing to do actually.
- net01 1y agoMost of the guys in the LB project don't use LLM's, even though it extremely spec-driven, because C++ is not great with AI for some reason.
- hyperbolablabla 1y agoBut Andreas does fairly heavily, if you watch his code VODs you see that he leans on copilot often.
- rzzzt 1y agoWith some "Thank you, Copilot"-s sprinkled in to spare him in the robot uprising universe.
- SpecialistK 1y agoI haven't watched the VODs myself but I am curious as to the nature of the Copilot use - is it a fancy autocomplete, a 2nd look at code he's already written, or is it generating large parts of the code? The SerenityOS project literally has "NIH syndrome" at its core ["the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch.", https://ladybird.org/#faq https://ladybird.org/#faq] so I would expect a degree of skepticism of AI code generation. But there was the post semi-recently about Cloudflare developers shipping a mostly-AI-generated software, overseen by real devs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166] Perhaps Andreas' use of Copilot is a similar thing, where he saves keystrokes and finds errors in the generated output with his own experience. I'll go watch some VODs.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoMost of it was written without LLMs for that reason, but now Ladybird is its own project, the NIH focus has largely gone away. They are using a lot of third party code now. Their mission is compete with Chrome, not be 100% NIH.
- lttlrck 1y agoWith "No code from other browsers" which in a browser must mean most of the code is largely written from scratch?
- xdfgh1112 1y agoThe original project did everything from scratch. Video/audio decoding, SSL, font rendering, etc. a huge portion of the code. They're still not using existing browser code because being an independent implementation of the web standards is a key goal. They've found bugs in the standard just by implementing it.
- RadiozRadioz 1y agoWould have to be at the hands of an already skilled practitioner. Average Joe programmer setting out to build a browser with Copilot will end badly. Big-picture architecture and discipline is too important with this level of complexity.
- larodi 1y agoNot what I meant really. antirez is not a junior yet codes with LLM assistence. Not sure why this gets downvoted but since when is it illegal to ask whether people actually use intellisense? I mean - what’s wrong with being interests how ppl bootstrap and get to thousands of LOCs in practically no time. Just for the record - I never said vibecoded.
- therein 1y agoA comment that could apply to anything. Notice how nobody except for your subthread here is talking about AI. This thread is not about AI or LLMs, for a good reason.
- kome 1y agothey’re downvoting you, but the developer actually uses copilot a lot in his development videos. why are people so up in arms? of course, he’s a very, very proficient developer and a browser specialist. he’s not just vibecoding, like you might be implying. but he also uses llms for development.
- squigz 1y agoBecause LLMs being a thing now has no bearing on whether it's a good idea or more practical to build a new browser.
- NoboruWataya 1y agoBecause it's bad enough (for those of us that aren't heavily invested in the topic) that often 50%+ of the frontpage is about AI now, to go into the comments for a clearly non-AI topic and see a bunch of "but what about LLMs" comments really just sucks the fun out of HN for a lot of us.
- larodi 1y agoThat’s not even close to true unless you rate all ML as AI and all conditional structures thinking. Like, why don’t you first try to rate and count them before spitting malice ? in all honestly much less AI stuff gets to the HN front compared to when OpenAI first released GPTs. Given there are thousands of publications every month and dozens of startups launched with ridiculous valuations and most of this is actually submitted here for karma or leverage. Besides, what, knowledge representation via stochastic probabilistic graphical models is now an heresy? Since when? Since MPEG or MP3 ?
- larodi 1y agoWell to my surprise they do, even though every sane dev in 2025 uses some sort of code assîtes autocomplete. So it seams now we discussing what is the threshold reg intelligence of the autocomplete. Ridiculous stuff indeed. I’ve been coding for 25 years and nothing in my message implies vibe coding. I know what I’m talking and sure bet many others here do.
- shakna 1y agoLadybird is 425k LOC. Chromium is 3.5m LOC. Starting a new browser, using LLMs... Is not going to maintain enough context. Whilst Andreas does use Copilot a fair bit [0], he tends to do a line at a time, frequently disagree and rewrites his own, before prompting again. That is... He basically uses it as a fancy autocomplete. Not much else. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8&t=3099s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8&t=3099s
- adamrt 1y agoI believe Chromium is closer to 35m LOC
- larodi 1y agoFancy or not an autocomplete is autocomplete. What if it autocompletes one class or one function at a time? Does this make it obnoxious to even think asking about it on HN?
- shakna 1y agoWe've had macro expansion since the 80s. If your IDE can't autocomplete, then it's a text editor and not an IDE. Which makes it an irrelevant question to ask, because it has no impact on making something feasible or not.
- larodi 1y agoOf course, brother, that’s the point. And while oldies one by one get to pair their IDEs with RAG+LLM autocompletes, some brothers keep raging against people using higher level code assistance. Which is both ridiculous and also very agressive.
- shakna 1y agoI'm not raging... But again... It's not relevant, here.
- Xaiph_Rahci 1y ago> Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy. Truer words have never been spoken! His monthly update videos are so soothing to watch.
- charcircuit 1y agoIn order for that to be true Ladybird would need a sizeable market share, more than browsers like Firefox, which also isn't made by a corporation.
- net01 1y agoHere's a guide to help you get started contributing: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Documentation/GettingStartedContributing.md https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Docu... Here are the latest Web Platform (WPT) tests: https://wpt.fyi/results/?run_id=6292901677236224 https://wpt.fyi/results/?run_id=6292901677236224 There is a Discord if you want to ask questions: https://discord.gg/c8JEZkDvtY https://discord.gg/c8JEZkDvtY Compile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR. how to build Ladybird https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Docu https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Docu...
- hyperbolablabla 1y agoI tried contributing but its too c++-y for me to understand it unfortunately.
- net01 1y agoThis is the way to start learning. Look at a WPT test and try to focus on it. Look at the web spec Ask questions in the Discord about where it would be, and people are gladly willing to help. :)
- QuantumNoodle 1y agoUnfortunately for c++, the industry is moving towards Rust. Even conservative gray-suit Corps are using rust for their new projects. The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase. Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it, but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust. Contribute to ladybird and learn c++ if the project interests you, but don't learn it for a career.
- saidinesh5 1y agoThere are plenty of embedded projects still being started with c. C++ also has a lot of demand where i am at. The advice about career is very geography and industry dependent. Almost no one hired Node.js developers in my city back when i started.
- Timwi 1y agoIt is so amazing and wholesome to see a huge team of people come together and just collaborate on something they are passionate about and seriously believe in. I'm very hopeful that Ladybird will get to the point where we can use it as a main browser.
- net01 1y agoCompile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR. how to build ladybird https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Documentation/BuildInstructionsLadybird.md https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Docu...
- perching_aix 1y agoWhy the commanding tone?
- net01 1y agoEnglish isn't my first language; sorry about that :)
- newdee 1y agoThank you for your helpful comment. I’m compiling it right now :)
- Henchman21 1y agoYour English seemed perfect to me, including the tone. Some people wilt at the mere suggestion that they do something.
- newdee 1y agoWhy the tone policing? This isn’t helpful. Whereas parent comment was to the point and linked to a helpful resource. Give people the benefit of the doubt and assume good intent.
- samuell 1y agoOn Twitter, Andreas points out that his Keynote Presentation on the Ladybird Browser on the FUTO conference in Texas earlier in the year, might be the best current introduction to the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YM7pDMLvr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YM7pDMLvr4
- dewey 1y agoI've watched this a few months ago after randomly seeing it on YouTube. It's a very good talk and fun to follow even if you are not a browser developer. He's a good presenter.
- Zardoz84 1y agoThe web is UTF-16 ? WTF
- osmsucks 1y agoJavaScript is: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding
- demurgos 1y ago> The ECMAScript/JavaScript language itself, however, exposes characters according to UCS-2, not UTF-16. The native JS semantics are UCS-2. Saying that it's UTF-16 is misleading and confuses charset, encoding and browser APIs. Ladybird is probably implementing support properly but it's annoying that they keep spreading the confusion in their article.
- dzaima 1y agoIt's not cleanly one or the other, really. It's UCS-2-y by `str.length` or `str[i]`, but UTF-16-y by `str.codePointAt(i)` or by iteration (`[...str]` or `for (x of str)`). Generally though JS's strings are just a list of 16-bit values, being intrinsically neither UCS-2 nor UTF-16. But, practically speaking, UTF-16 is the description that matters for everything other than writing `str.length`/`str[i]`.
- chrismorgan 1y ago• Regular indexing (also charAt and charCodeAt) is by UTF-16 code unit and produces UTF-16 code units. • codePointAt is indexed by UTF-16 code unit, but produces Unicode code points (normally scalar values, but surrogates where ill-formed). • String iteration doesn’t need indexing, and thus is Unicody, not UTF-16y. • Approximately everything that JavaScript interacts with is actually UTF-8 now: URIs have long been UTF-8 (hence encodeURI/decodeURI/encodeURIComponent being UTF-8y). • Where appropriate, new work favours UTF-8 semantics. —⁂— Overall, I’d say it’s most reasonable to frame it this way: ① JavaScript models strings as potentially-ill-formed UTF-16. (I prefer the word “models” to the word “represents” here, because the latter suggests a specific storage, which is not actually necessary.) ② Old parts of JavaScript depend on indexing, and use potentially-ill-formed UTF-16 code unit semantics. ③ New parts of JavaScript avoid indexing, and use Unicode semantics.
- Pooge 1y agoFor some reason I can't find the RSS feed for the newsletter; anyone that did who could post it here? I can only find the one for the "announcements"—which seem a lot less relevant to follow the progress of the project.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JimDabell 1y agohttps://buttondown.com/ladybird/ https://buttondown.com/ladybird/
- haunter 1y agoWhy Discord though? Truly independent project, keep big corps away, future of the web at stake here yada yada yet using the most walled garden of walled gardens. If there is no publicly accessible and searchable archive then might as well not exist.
- BoredPositron 1y agoBecause it's chat if you treat it like a knowledge base it's on you.
- frou_dh 1y agoCome on, it's inevitable that chat history becomes a knowledge base to some extent even if the participants are aware of this pitfall.
- BoredPositron 1y agoOnly if you let it.
- globular-toast 1y agoIf that were true than IRC would be absolutely perfect.
- perching_aix 1y agoSo would be Discord, and so it is.
- dotnetcarpenter 1y agoSerenityOS used IRC but when Andreas changed to discord he saw a massive influx of developers. I assume that it was a no brainer to use discord when forking Ladybird...
- MaxBarraclough 1y agoThe distinction isn't always clear. If you're studying the history of the Linux kernel, you'll want to make use of its mailing list archives.
- biehl 1y agoAny news on the usage of Swift?
- Kholin 1y agoIf their blog has an RSS feed, that would be great for people who want to follow their work.
- 0points 1y agoWhat do you even mean "if their blog had a RSS feed"? The feed is right there in the link being discussed.
- uallo 1y agoThey mean that https://ladybird.org/posts.rss https://ladybird.org/posts.rss only includes "news" (last updated in October 2024) but not "newsletters". In another thread, there is a link to the newsletter archive which can be subscribed to with a feed reader: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765710
- edent 1y agoI wonder if Ladybird will ever become a member of the WHAT-WG steering group. It would be nice to see more / any independent voices on there.
- mrob 1y ago120Hz limit for high refresh rate support seems strange. The most common refresh rate for high refresh rate monitors is 144Hz, and faster refresh rates are available. If you run a 120fps animation on a 144Hz monitor you'll get duplicated frames, which negates a large part of the benefit.
- hyperbrainer 1y agoMy first thought was that this was done with consideration for mobile phones, since many higher-end models use 120 Hz displays, but Ladybird does not seem to support mobile for now. > Websites using requestAnimationFrame now render at up to 120Hz on supported hardware But the phrasing of it about "can now" suggests to me that this may simply be a performance issue too. They changed it from 60 to 120. Perhaps in the future they can go from 120 to 144 or even 240.
- m12k 1y agoMaybe the developer that implemented it only had a 120hz display to test it on?
- trflynn89 1y agoI think this was just worded a bit wrong in the newsletter. In the actual code, it is set to the refresh rate of the screen itself.
- Melatonic 1y agoThere are monitors running 120hz and you can set most 144hz monitors to 120 if you want to down clock them Also why would running 120 frames on 144 largely negate the benefits ? The whole reason we settled on these numbers is they are all multiples of 24 in the first place
- pmkary 1y agoYou guys are on fire!
- pmkary 1y agoYou guys are hugely on fire. Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production? This is truly one of the greatest things I have seen in my lifetime.
- kloop 1y ago> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production? Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch. This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.
- badsectoracula 1y agoExactly, and to add to that: people who work on the stuff they personally like tend to do thing faster than people who work on stuff because they have to (like it is often the case in large enterprises).
- sho_hn 1y agoIt also helps that working on a browser engine is "easy" in the sense that you are developing to a known target and there are increasingly decent test suites available. It helps a lot with keeping motivation alive since there's a persistent drip feed of low-hanging fruit and it'd easy to quantify your productivity and you don't get super stuck, vs. having to innovate or greenfield stuff. Teams of skilled volunteers excel at this, and makes for fairly easy contributor recruitment to feed that team. Making a browser engine is almost the ideal case. The breadth of the task is staggering, but there is a real shot at posting the necessary endurance given the circumstances, being thrifty and given time. Before you reach for the downvote button for talking out of my arse and calling what the Ladybird folks doing a (qualified, specific) "easy", when we at KDE created KHTML which later begat WebKit, for many years - kling might remember! - our IRC channel topic was "which mozilla bug do we emulate today?", so I've seen it happen once before! Ladybird can succeed; consider contributing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- donadolabs 1y agoUnbelievable process, this guys are crushing it
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- OptionX 1y agoReally really hope these guys get a foothold in the market. I'm a decades long Firefox user but even I have to admit things with Mozilla aren't looking bright so projects like this are the only things that can save us from the chrome clone wars.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhat I really find useful in Firefox and not in other browsers is the native browser functionality/UI besides rendering webpages. I think Ladybird isn't focusing on those.
- neverrroot 1y agoThe power of one, the power of a mind who can’t take no for an answer to the inner voice. And don’t lecture me about the many, for the many wouldn’t have started it, they joined the one. You know the one, cherish him. Thanks!
- karambanoonoo 1y agoHow long until it gets abandoned too?
- sertsa 1y agoIf on an Arch based distro, Ladybird is in AUR. Easy to try, compiling now!
- Havoc 1y agoHow is the ladybird experience at the moment? Coming from FF and basically just need ublock and a handful of extensions that make YT usable
- zhec 1y agoIt's currently in pre-alpha phase and glitches on pretty much every modern website (source: I just compiled and tested), so not very usable right now. Their target is to release in 2028. (See https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1895767072639951341 https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1895767072639951341)
- Havoc 1y agoThanks for the feedback. Hopefully it becomes more usable asap...keen for this to not turn into a chrome(ium) mono-culture