6 ms·

This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

289 points by exploraz 29d ago

neuralkoi 29d ago
I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon! Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.
- sho_hn 26d ago
  > Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being. Somehow that's not the "a new independent Open Source browser" future I thought we had signed up for with our attention. Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself. But it makes me think a lot about the value proposition of the product. Re-creating Firefox/Chrome can still be a useful exercise, but from an end-user POV another exchangable web browser will not rock their world. Wouldn't the real product be healthy governance?
  - hagbard_c 26d ago
    > It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being. That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.
    - riffraff 26d ago
      Don't BSDs accept new contributors and patches tho? A long time ago I worked in the freebsd documentation project (translating th handbook) and it was pretty easy to join the core group. And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it? For ladybird it seems the group is closed to outsiders.
      - hoistbypetard 26d ago
        > And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it? That's not really relevant. "anoncvs" was just the ability to retrieve source code from the project's repository without an account, as opposed to being forced to download a tarball. It didn't do anything more than ladybird's public github-hosted repository[1] to facilitate contributions. Think of ladybird's github issues like the openbsd mailing lists. If you start submitting good issues with patches there, and you do it often enough that they would rather let you merge your patches yourself, there's a high likelihood you'll no longer be an outsider. (I don't know this from personal experience with ladybird, but it's the vibe I get from their posts about the matter.) [1](https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybirdP https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybirdP)
    - ptx 26d ago
      No, it isn't. Ladybird [0]: "We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers. [...] There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means." FreeBSD [1]: "So you want to contribute to FreeBSD? That is great! FreeBSD relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD’s continued growth. [...] If you are submitting a simple patch to the src repo, please consider submitting it to the project’s GitHub mirror as a pull request." [0] https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/
  - tredre3 26d ago
    The flood of low effort AI-contributions makes accepting anonymous contributions impractical nowadays. They'd waste hours reviewing things of no value. I know because it happened to several of my moderately successful projects. At some point I had to stop caring. I now only review the PR if the message is a single unformatted paragraph with few emojis, I find this to be a good signal that it was made by a human and not an agent (the code could still be LLM but a human cared enough to write their own message). I'm sure I will miss genuinely good and valuable contributions, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low. It would be 100x worse for them because who wouldn't want to have a browser in their contribution portfolio when seeking a job?
    - cosmic_cheese 26d ago
      A lot of folks might not want to hear it, but realistically some there's going to have to be a cultural realization that machine-generated low effort slop is not any more desired or helpful than human-generated low effort slop. That's not an outright rejection of LLM-assisted code, it just means that a real person needs to be awake, at the wheel, and just as significant of a contributor. Literally anybody can point Claude at a repo and say "add X feature" or "fix Y bug" and so PRs that do that carry no value.
      - zaphar 26d ago
        The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.
        cosmic_cheese 26d ago
        The important part is the quality of the code, how well-considered its design is, how well it gels with existing code, how readable it is to other humans, how well documented it is, how well its author understands it (and thus, can make surgical changes if needed), and how well it was tested. A PR that implements a sought out feature or bug fix can be practically worthless if it doesn’t check some percentage of those boxes. The line differs per project naturally, but almost nobody wants a PR that is missing all of them.
  - pipeline_peak 26d ago
    Linux had an existing population of Unix engineers who had a strong incentive to build something that could replace the Unix systems they were paying for. Ladybird doesn’t replace something developers are already paying for, so the incentive to make substantial, high-quality contributions is much weaker.
  - swed420 26d ago
    > Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself. This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve. Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.
  - _jackdk_ 26d ago
    I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.
    - charcircuit 26d ago
      Multiple browser engines reimplementing the same things fragments engineering resources and blink based browsers do have working as blockers. In fact ladybird uses the same adblocker as Brave, which is blink based.
      - zarzavat 26d ago
        It also fragments power, which makes it worth it.
        charcircuit 26d ago
        Power is proportional to browser market share, not the engines the browsers use.
  - JuniperMesos 26d ago
    Free and open-source software licenses never promised that any given project would absolutely accept code contributions from the general public. You're as free to exercise the Four Freedoms with Ladybird as you are with Firefox or Chromium, including the freedom to fork it; and your practical ability to get your own change merged into upstream Ladybird is probably about as good as it is for Firefox/Chromium, too.
  - zamadatix 26d ago
    Said announcement: https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/
binarymax 26d ago
Really excited for alpha. When it hits I plan on using it for my daily driver to help them with usage stats and crash reports.
phendrenad2 26d ago
Feels like the old "browser wars" days again. Between AI productivity, and Google losing the grace to bloat the web specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take market share away from other browsers as soon as it's stable.
- pkasting 26d ago
  Sure, it could easily take 1%. Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons. 1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team. 2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient. My perspective on this is informed by being on Google Chrome from inception to 2025. Chrome from near the beginning was well-engineered and had three compelling-according-to-user-research advantages over the IE of 2008 (speed, security, and not being made by Microsoft), but mass adoption depended on a large number of non-engineering factors, of which marketing/distribution was (to a then-mid-20s software engineer) the most surprising one. I didn't believe that was what made the difference in which browser most people used; I was very wrong. Techies are not the leading-edge trendsetters for the masses we sometimes believe we are. IMO, taking mass market share in the future will require either a compelling-to-users product coupled with at least a couple hundred million dollars in marketing and distribution budget, or else something that is completely unlike web browsers of the past (maybe there's something that replaces the web entirely). No one has done the former since Chrome launched; the closest people have come to the latter thus far is things like Dia/Atlas that try to reimagine workflows in an AI context, and I think the market has not found those to be sufficiently different+compelling.
  - ndiddy 26d ago
    Yeah basically everybody I know who's non-technical switched to Chrome when Google started advertising it on google.com (This was back when nontechnical users would start every search query by going to google.com). "Oh this says it's better and faster, let me download it". Google also paid shareware/freeware developers to bundle Chrome with their installers if you didn't uncheck some option in the "expert install" mode. Chrome would then launch and prompt the user to set it as the default browser. This is somewhat questionable, but this sort of developer usually pushes some sort of malware in their installers so I suppose Chrome was an improvement on that.
Cider9986 26d ago
Are there other sites that get through ad blockers as well as Twitch?
jazzyjackson 26d ago
This is such a nerdy newsletter I love it
Meneth 26d ago
> We also download over four parallel connections where possible. I hope you can turn that off. It fragments the file and puts unnecessary load on the server.
- malfist 26d ago
  Disk fragmentation isn't a thing for ssd's
  - drdexebtjl 26d ago
    It's still a thing. https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun
- ronsor 26d ago
  > unnecessary load In some situations it's the only way to get a decent download speed.
- rzzzt 26d ago
  You never used a download manager like DownThemAll or GetBot back in the day? As far as fragmentation goes, I think both Firefox and Chrome derivatives figure out the final file size in advance, pre-allocate a temporary file that long and put data in it as it arrives. Completing the download is a rename operation or a no-op.
  - ChickeNES 26d ago
    GetRight was a fucking lifesaver when I was stuck on a 28.8k dial up connection that loved to drop at the worst possible time.
    - lproven 26d ago
      I haven't thought of that name in decades, but you're right, it really was. :-) GetRight, then DownThemAll, and now, Multithreaded Download Manager: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded-download-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded...
viking_fullz 26d ago
[flagged]
- perching_aix 26d ago
  what makes this a scam in your opinion, and how exactly do you reckon they are fooling investors? snide vagueposting is a lot less cool than you think it is
  - swed420 26d ago
    It's probably the mozilla ceo
senfiaj 26d ago
I am watching this project with interest. It's impressive that they're doing such titanic work. However, I'm highly skeptical that they can create a real rival to established browsers. I'm sorry for telling this, but Web standards are simply too complex and huge. Ladybird to Chrome / Firefox is almost like Wine / ReactOS to Windows, that last 3-5% of gap actually differentiates a normal browser from a browser that is a pain for web developers. And it's the most stubborn part to be fixed. Also, keep in mind that it hasn't much market, at least IE had a significant market that forced the developers to support it (with all the hate). https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-browser-with-a-completely-new-engine https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...
- hughw 26d ago
  As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great. Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.
  - senfiaj 26d ago
    The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.
    - regularfry 26d ago
      That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the gap between any pair of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, just from varied depth of implementation of more recent standards.
  - senfiaj 26d ago
Ozzie-D 26d ago
[flagged]
robinpie 26d ago
So excited about this. Writing a real new web browser is a titanic project and Ladybird is making amazing progress
junaru 26d ago
If you ever said you'd pay for a browser that doesn't exploit you nows the chance - donate to the project!
dotinvictim 26d ago
[flagged]
- Pooge 26d ago
  You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
- dainank 26d ago
  On a serious note, it would be nice if in the far far future, once the browser is very stable, they release a windows binary since I do sometimes still use Windows 11 for moments when it is needed and it would be a shame to then temporarily still have to switch to Edge e.t.c. instead of being able to use Ladybird there too.
KingMob 26d ago
Ugh, this guy again. I would stop using the web forever before I used Ladybird or anything made by Kling. You praise DHH and Charlie Kirk, your moral compass is broken.
- krispyfi 26d ago
  Context: https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/ https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
  - KingMob 26d ago
    That's just the start of how many people came to learn about Kling. There was worse to come, apparently.
  - Havoc 26d ago
    TLDR: pronoun drama
    - deleted 26d ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 24d ago
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- surajrmal 26d ago
  People are all flawed. You can find faults in everyone. Overlooking these flaws is okay to a large number of folks as the product itself is amazing. The fact is that you're likely ignorant to the large number of products and services you use produced by folks with similar flaws.
  - unethical_ban 26d ago
    Is your suggestion that no one care?
    - 25d ago
vivzkestrel 26d ago
few stupid questions as always so that i can become a smarter person - what is the process of making a browser engine? what does the requirements look like - how is an actual html, css and javascript speification implemented at the code level? are we painting an empty canvas or is it more complicated - how is backward compatibility implemented? - is all the code written in c++ or is it rust these days? - how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch - what test cases do you consider for making something like this? how do you determine if you have handled all the outliers or not? - how is mobile vs desktop handled at the browser engine code level?
- throwa356262 26d ago
  For the first two, I highly suggest you watch a few of their videos from about a year ago.
- strangecasts 26d ago
  The book Web Browser Engineering may be interesting: https://browser.engineering/ https://browser.engineering/ > - how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch The boring not-really-an-answer is "it depends on which sites you want to render properly": a browser capable of rendering Hacker News is a perfectly fine one-person project (which the book would get you to), supporting things like banking and online mail requires not just developers but also people willing to "dogfood" test it as their daily browser
- nicoburns 26d ago
  > what is the process of making a browser engine? what does the requirements look like I second https://browser.engineering https://browser.engineering as a resource on that. Also consider dropping into the Servo Zulip. > how is an actual html, css and javascript specification implemented at the code level? are we painting an empty canvas or is it more complicated It's more complicated, but conceptually it's painting into an empty canvas > how is backward compatibility implemented? > what test cases do you consider for making something like this? how do you determine if you have handled all the outliers or not? The ~2 million Web Platform Tests https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt. They also handle most of the backwards compatibility. The rest is engine developers manually comparing against each other's engines. > is all the code written in c++ or is it rust these days? There's still a lot of C++, but new code is increasingly Rust. To what degree varies by engine: Servo (and Blitz) are almost entirely Rust. Ladybird was 100% C++ in February, but is now 25% Rust. Firefox has significant and actively developed core components in Rust, but isn't actively converting more core modules. Chromium doesn't have any core components in Rust yet, but has invested heavily in converting foundational dependencies like FreeType and HarfBuzz to Rust. Safari is the outlier, I believe it doesn't use any Rust yet. > how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch I've heard estimates that Chrome has a team of >1000, Firefox 500-800, Safari 100-200, Servo / Ladybird are more like 5-10. I've been building Blitz by myself for ~3 years. Something like 3-5 years is probably a minimum if you're truly building from scratch unless you have a really large team backing it, and depending on your success criteria. > how is mobile vs desktop handled at the browser engine code level? There are actually surprisingly few differences beyond touch input and screen size handling.
ahartmetz 26d ago
I'm honestly relieved to see that I'm not the only one to test optimized/newer implementations against less optimized/older implementations. It's what I came up with after thinking about it for quite a while and I've been wondering why so little other software seems to do that. In my case, it's about serialization code. My test compare self-reported reader / writer states and serialized data. Ladybird goes further by also running the engines in parallel in debug builds during normal use. They have a way to extract test cases from any bugs found that way.

289 points by exploraz 29d ago

I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon! Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.

sho_hn 26d ago
> Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being. Somehow that's not the "a new independent Open Source browser" future I thought we had signed up for with our attention. Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself. But it makes me think a lot about the value proposition of the product. Re-creating Firefox/Chrome can still be a useful exercise, but from an end-user POV another exchangable web browser will not rock their world. Wouldn't the real product be healthy governance?
- hagbard_c 26d ago
  > It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being. That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.
  - riffraff 26d ago
    Don't BSDs accept new contributors and patches tho? A long time ago I worked in the freebsd documentation project (translating th handbook) and it was pretty easy to join the core group. And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it? For ladybird it seems the group is closed to outsiders.
    - hoistbypetard 26d ago
      > And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it? That's not really relevant. "anoncvs" was just the ability to retrieve source code from the project's repository without an account, as opposed to being forced to download a tarball. It didn't do anything more than ladybird's public github-hosted repository[1] to facilitate contributions. Think of ladybird's github issues like the openbsd mailing lists. If you start submitting good issues with patches there, and you do it often enough that they would rather let you merge your patches yourself, there's a high likelihood you'll no longer be an outsider. (I don't know this from personal experience with ladybird, but it's the vibe I get from their posts about the matter.) [1](https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybirdP https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybirdP)
  - ptx 26d ago
    No, it isn't. Ladybird [0]: "We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers. [...] There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means." FreeBSD [1]: "So you want to contribute to FreeBSD? That is great! FreeBSD relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD’s continued growth. [...] If you are submitting a simple patch to the src repo, please consider submitting it to the project’s GitHub mirror as a pull request." [0] https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/
- tredre3 26d ago
  The flood of low effort AI-contributions makes accepting anonymous contributions impractical nowadays. They'd waste hours reviewing things of no value. I know because it happened to several of my moderately successful projects. At some point I had to stop caring. I now only review the PR if the message is a single unformatted paragraph with few emojis, I find this to be a good signal that it was made by a human and not an agent (the code could still be LLM but a human cared enough to write their own message). I'm sure I will miss genuinely good and valuable contributions, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low. It would be 100x worse for them because who wouldn't want to have a browser in their contribution portfolio when seeking a job?
  - cosmic_cheese 26d ago
    A lot of folks might not want to hear it, but realistically some there's going to have to be a cultural realization that machine-generated low effort slop is not any more desired or helpful than human-generated low effort slop. That's not an outright rejection of LLM-assisted code, it just means that a real person needs to be awake, at the wheel, and just as significant of a contributor. Literally anybody can point Claude at a repo and say "add X feature" or "fix Y bug" and so PRs that do that carry no value.
    - zaphar 26d ago
      The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.
      - cosmic_cheese 26d ago
        The important part is the quality of the code, how well-considered its design is, how well it gels with existing code, how readable it is to other humans, how well documented it is, how well its author understands it (and thus, can make surgical changes if needed), and how well it was tested. A PR that implements a sought out feature or bug fix can be practically worthless if it doesn’t check some percentage of those boxes. The line differs per project naturally, but almost nobody wants a PR that is missing all of them.
- pipeline_peak 26d ago
  Linux had an existing population of Unix engineers who had a strong incentive to build something that could replace the Unix systems they were paying for. Ladybird doesn’t replace something developers are already paying for, so the incentive to make substantial, high-quality contributions is much weaker.
- swed420 26d ago
  > Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself. This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve. Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.
- _jackdk_ 26d ago
  I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.
  - charcircuit 26d ago
    Multiple browser engines reimplementing the same things fragments engineering resources and blink based browsers do have working as blockers. In fact ladybird uses the same adblocker as Brave, which is blink based.
    - zarzavat 26d ago
      It also fragments power, which makes it worth it.
      - charcircuit 26d ago
        Power is proportional to browser market share, not the engines the browsers use.
- JuniperMesos 26d ago
  Free and open-source software licenses never promised that any given project would absolutely accept code contributions from the general public. You're as free to exercise the Four Freedoms with Ladybird as you are with Firefox or Chromium, including the freedom to fork it; and your practical ability to get your own change merged into upstream Ladybird is probably about as good as it is for Firefox/Chromium, too.
- zamadatix 26d ago
  Said announcement: https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/ https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

binarymax 26d ago

Really excited for alpha. When it hits I plan on using it for my daily driver to help them with usage stats and crash reports.

phendrenad2 26d ago

Feels like the old "browser wars" days again. Between AI productivity, and Google losing the grace to bloat the web specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take market share away from other browsers as soon as it's stable.

pkasting 26d ago
Sure, it could easily take 1%. Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons. 1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team. 2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient. My perspective on this is informed by being on Google Chrome from inception to 2025. Chrome from near the beginning was well-engineered and had three compelling-according-to-user-research advantages over the IE of 2008 (speed, security, and not being made by Microsoft), but mass adoption depended on a large number of non-engineering factors, of which marketing/distribution was (to a then-mid-20s software engineer) the most surprising one. I didn't believe that was what made the difference in which browser most people used; I was very wrong. Techies are not the leading-edge trendsetters for the masses we sometimes believe we are. IMO, taking mass market share in the future will require either a compelling-to-users product coupled with at least a couple hundred million dollars in marketing and distribution budget, or else something that is completely unlike web browsers of the past (maybe there's something that replaces the web entirely). No one has done the former since Chrome launched; the closest people have come to the latter thus far is things like Dia/Atlas that try to reimagine workflows in an AI context, and I think the market has not found those to be sufficiently different+compelling.
- ndiddy 26d ago
  Yeah basically everybody I know who's non-technical switched to Chrome when Google started advertising it on google.com (This was back when nontechnical users would start every search query by going to google.com). "Oh this says it's better and faster, let me download it". Google also paid shareware/freeware developers to bundle Chrome with their installers if you didn't uncheck some option in the "expert install" mode. Chrome would then launch and prompt the user to set it as the default browser. This is somewhat questionable, but this sort of developer usually pushes some sort of malware in their installers so I suppose Chrome was an improvement on that.

Cider9986 26d ago

Are there other sites that get through ad blockers as well as Twitch?

jazzyjackson 26d ago

This is such a nerdy newsletter I love it

Meneth 26d ago

> We also download over four parallel connections where possible. I hope you can turn that off. It fragments the file and puts unnecessary load on the server.

malfist 26d ago
Disk fragmentation isn't a thing for ssd's
- drdexebtjl 26d ago
  It's still a thing. https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun
ronsor 26d ago
> unnecessary load In some situations it's the only way to get a decent download speed.
rzzzt 26d ago
You never used a download manager like DownThemAll or GetBot back in the day? As far as fragmentation goes, I think both Firefox and Chrome derivatives figure out the final file size in advance, pre-allocate a temporary file that long and put data in it as it arrives. Completing the download is a rename operation or a no-op.
- ChickeNES 26d ago
  GetRight was a fucking lifesaver when I was stuck on a 28.8k dial up connection that loved to drop at the worst possible time.
  - lproven 26d ago
    I haven't thought of that name in decades, but you're right, it really was. :-) GetRight, then DownThemAll, and now, Multithreaded Download Manager: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded-download-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded...

viking_fullz 26d ago

[flagged]

perching_aix 26d ago
what makes this a scam in your opinion, and how exactly do you reckon they are fooling investors? snide vagueposting is a lot less cool than you think it is
- swed420 26d ago
  It's probably the mozilla ceo

senfiaj 26d ago

I am watching this project with interest. It's impressive that they're doing such titanic work. However, I'm highly skeptical that they can create a real rival to established browsers. I'm sorry for telling this, but Web standards are simply too complex and huge. Ladybird to Chrome / Firefox is almost like Wine / ReactOS to Windows, that last 3-5% of gap actually differentiates a normal browser from a browser that is a pain for web developers. And it's the most stubborn part to be fixed. Also, keep in mind that it hasn't much market, at least IE had a significant market that forced the developers to support it (with all the hate). https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-browser-with-a-completely-new-engine https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...

hughw 26d ago
As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great. Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.
- senfiaj 26d ago
  The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.
  - regularfry 26d ago
    That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the gap between any pair of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, just from varied depth of implementation of more recent standards.
- senfiaj 26d ago

Ozzie-D 26d ago

[flagged]

robinpie 26d ago

So excited about this. Writing a real new web browser is a titanic project and Ladybird is making amazing progress

junaru 26d ago

If you ever said you'd pay for a browser that doesn't exploit you nows the chance - donate to the project!

dotinvictim 26d ago

[flagged]

Pooge 26d ago
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
dainank 26d ago
On a serious note, it would be nice if in the far far future, once the browser is very stable, they release a windows binary since I do sometimes still use Windows 11 for moments when it is needed and it would be a shame to then temporarily still have to switch to Edge e.t.c. instead of being able to use Ladybird there too.

KingMob 26d ago

Ugh, this guy again. I would stop using the web forever before I used Ladybird or anything made by Kling. You praise DHH and Charlie Kirk, your moral compass is broken.

krispyfi 26d ago
Context: https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/ https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
- KingMob 26d ago
  That's just the start of how many people came to learn about Kling. There was worse to come, apparently.
- Havoc 26d ago
  TLDR: pronoun drama
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surajrmal 26d ago
People are all flawed. You can find faults in everyone. Overlooking these flaws is okay to a large number of folks as the product itself is amazing. The fact is that you're likely ignorant to the large number of products and services you use produced by folks with similar flaws.
- unethical_ban 26d ago
  Is your suggestion that no one care?
  - 25d ago

vivzkestrel 26d ago

few stupid questions as always so that i can become a smarter person - what is the process of making a browser engine? what does the requirements look like - how is an actual html, css and javascript speification implemented at the code level? are we painting an empty canvas or is it more complicated - how is backward compatibility implemented? - is all the code written in c++ or is it rust these days? - how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch - what test cases do you consider for making something like this? how do you determine if you have handled all the outliers or not? - how is mobile vs desktop handled at the browser engine code level?

throwa356262 26d ago
For the first two, I highly suggest you watch a few of their videos from about a year ago.
strangecasts 26d ago
The book Web Browser Engineering may be interesting: https://browser.engineering/ https://browser.engineering/ > - how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch The boring not-really-an-answer is "it depends on which sites you want to render properly": a browser capable of rendering Hacker News is a perfectly fine one-person project (which the book would get you to), supporting things like banking and online mail requires not just developers but also people willing to "dogfood" test it as their daily browser
nicoburns 26d ago
> what is the process of making a browser engine? what does the requirements look like I second https://browser.engineering https://browser.engineering as a resource on that. Also consider dropping into the Servo Zulip. > how is an actual html, css and javascript specification implemented at the code level? are we painting an empty canvas or is it more complicated It's more complicated, but conceptually it's painting into an empty canvas > how is backward compatibility implemented? > what test cases do you consider for making something like this? how do you determine if you have handled all the outliers or not? The ~2 million Web Platform Tests https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt. They also handle most of the backwards compatibility. The rest is engine developers manually comparing against each other's engines. > is all the code written in c++ or is it rust these days? There's still a lot of C++, but new code is increasingly Rust. To what degree varies by engine: Servo (and Blitz) are almost entirely Rust. Ladybird was 100% C++ in February, but is now 25% Rust. Firefox has significant and actively developed core components in Rust, but isn't actively converting more core modules. Chromium doesn't have any core components in Rust yet, but has invested heavily in converting foundational dependencies like FreeType and HarfBuzz to Rust. Safari is the outlier, I believe it doesn't use any Rust yet. > how many people in a team do you need and how long would it take to write a browser engine from scratch I've heard estimates that Chrome has a team of >1000, Firefox 500-800, Safari 100-200, Servo / Ladybird are more like 5-10. I've been building Blitz by myself for ~3 years. Something like 3-5 years is probably a minimum if you're truly building from scratch unless you have a really large team backing it, and depending on your success criteria. > how is mobile vs desktop handled at the browser engine code level? There are actually surprisingly few differences beyond touch input and screen size handling.

ahartmetz 26d ago

I'm honestly relieved to see that I'm not the only one to test optimized/newer implementations against less optimized/older implementations. It's what I came up with after thinking about it for quite a while and I've been wondering why so little other software seems to do that. In my case, it's about serialization code. My test compare self-reported reader / writer states and serialized data. Ladybird goes further by also running the engines in parallel in debug builds during normal use. They have a way to extract test cases from any bugs found that way.