Comment by jwells89
1 year ago
This is great to see either way, but does anybody know if Ladybird's engine is being designed with embedded use in mind?
One of the big missteps that led to Blink/Chromium and to a lesser extent WebKit overtaking Gecko was Mozilla's choice to remove embedding support from Gecko and effectively make Firefox the only modern Gecko browser. It'd be great to get a new browser but it'd be even better to get a new web engine to embed that's not the hulking behemoth that is Blink.
I've been waiting for an embedable, rust-based, browser library broken down into modules like "rendering", "scripting", "network", "encoding", etc, for over a decade now. At certain points, it felt like a foregone conclusions. These days, it feels like no one else even wants something like that (or at least, no one is willing to work on it in the open).
All I want to do is write apps that have native performance using the world's most popular document format and styling language, and so far the only response that even remotely looks like interest in that from the OS designers has been "use a webview" because they apparently, inexplicably understand the first clause of this sentence as 'I would like to embed a full browser stack to accommodate visuals'.
Check what is happening in Servo (https://servo.org). Some active members also want something very modular, and this is helped by work being actively done to use the engine in various contexts.
As I understand, Ladybird was originally just the embedded HTML renderer for SerenityOS known as LibWeb. "Ladybird" is just the cross platform UI skin for an embedded LibWeb.