Comment by 1GZ0
9 months ago
Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to.
The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors.
It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point.
While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.
> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market
At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi
But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox
A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it
> At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi
The important thing to keep in mind with this announcement is that the glacial pace was previously a restriction of being attached to SerenityOS. Everything needed to be built from scratch with no reliance on third party libraries. Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.
> Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.
now they could embed chromium LOL
Indeed! Now they can use chromium and get a big running start /s
I’m not sure what in the FOSS ecosystem will actually help them if they’re trying to take a fresh set of eyes on implementing a web browser.
EDIT: ga sibling comment beat me to the joke
3 replies →
> and the project is well funded by large investors.
Hmm, why is there no mention of that in the splitting announcement?
Did said large investors trigger the drop of SerenityOS because they don't want to waste their resources on a niche hobby platform?
Ladybird does not have investors, only sponsors/donors. We have received some really generous donations in the past, for example $100,000 from Shopify in 2023 which allowed me to hire a few of our contributors to work full time on the project. :)
Sponsors have no direct influence over the project, but I obviously feel a strong moral obligation to put 100% of the funds towards improving Ladybird and nothing else.
100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)
3 replies →
Apologies, I did mean "well sponsored" not well funded, my mistake :') You're doing awesome work and I'm really excited for you and the project! All the best :)
I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS.
But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment.
The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.
I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled.
(Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)
Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic.
I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.
I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".
As a Firefox user, this exactly.
The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on.
I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
26 replies →
Agree, hopefully King Andreas can carry the torch ignited by Old Mozilla that was lost a few years back.
> The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.
> But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project.
I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more.
The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.
Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names.
But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)
> The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.
One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).
5 replies →
>or turning into a murderous wacko
A good example of truth being stranger than fiction.
Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really.
I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.
On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?
There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more.
To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane, amount of optimization in there. But then we write websites that are barely adequate, and load them up with ad scripts that aren't even barely adequate, and blame the browsers for being slow.
Write yourself an old-school 1998-style static website without a big pile of fancy features, give yourself solid .css and .js caching and use it judiciously, and the browsers can blast content to the screen blazingly fast, for all the work it is doing.
If you even could feed a 2024 web site to a 1998 browser, you'd probably be able to eat a meal while it was trying to render facebook.
2 replies →
As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.
5 replies →
One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.
LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.
2 replies →
As someone developing web games, my answer is no.
3 replies →
> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.
Definitely Ladybird, but I'd also love to see Servo and Netsurf being developed.
Yeah I agree. Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. People say it’s not doable but this here is a real opportunity.
There are also: Servo, Netsurf, Ekioh Flow.
> Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old.
Chrome is less than 20 years old.
KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.
11 replies →
Chrome forked from Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which apparently dates from 4th November 1998, so Chrome's base is 25 years and 7 months old tomorrow.
KHTML was born in 1998 and became the foundation of Chrome and Safari. All major browsers are over a decade old, or just skins of decade+ old engines.